Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Published
David R. Cerbone
acumen
David R. Cerbone, 2006
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: opening exercises 1
1 Husserl and the project of pure phenomenology 11
2 Heidegger and the existential turn 39
3 Sartre and subjectivity 68
4 Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of embodiment 96
5 Problems and prospects: phenomenology and its critics 134
Questions for discussion and revision 177
Further reading 181
References 185
Index 187
contents v
Acknowledgements
Over the course of writing this book, I have incurred many debts.
Indeed, many of these debts extend well back before work began on
this project. I must acknowledge Hubert Dreyfus, with whom I first
studied Heideggers Being and Time (and phenomenology more gener-
ally) and from whom I continue to learn and draw inspiration. Randall
Havas has been a mentor and friend for roughly twenty years. Ran-
dalls influence on my thinking has been immeasurable and his support
has been unwavering; he is also to be thanked for taking the time to
provide detailed comments on previous drafts of this work. Another
friend, Wayne Martin, also provided incredibly detailed, sometimes
daunting, comments that I have tried to accommodate in the course of
making revisions. Ed Minar also deserves special mention for reading
the manuscript in its entirety and offering both criticism and encour-
agement. I should also like to thank the many people with whom I have
discussed phenomenology over the years and from whose work I have
learned more than I could ever have discovered on my own: Steven
Affeldt, William Blattner, Taylor Carman, Steven Crowell, Charles Gui-
gnon, John Haugeland, Sean Kelly, Rebecca Kukla, Cristina Lafont, Jeff
Malpas, Mark Okrent, Joseph Rouse, Ted Schatzki, Joseph Schear, Hans
Sluga and Mark Wrathall. (And although it is very likely that the word
phenomenology has never passed between us, I must acknowledge
the tremendous influence of Barry Stroud on my thinking.) Some parts
of the book were presented at an annual meeting of the International
Society for Phenomenological Studies, and I am grateful to my fellow
members for their insightful comments and criticisms. Thanks go as
acknowledgements vii
well to the people at Acumen connected with this project: Steven Ger-
rard and Tristan Palmer, and the series editor, Jack Reynolds, as well
as two anonymous referees, who provided detailed, extremely helpful
comments and criticisms. Thanks as well to Kate Williams for her easy-
going expertise in preparing the manuscript for publication. I should
also like to acknowledge Humanity Books, for allowing me to use bits
and pieces of my paper, Phenomenology: Straight and Hetero in my
discussion of Dennett and Husserl in Chapter 5.
A great deal of what is now this book began as lecture notes for
courses I have taught over the past several years, and I am grateful
to the many students who have allowed themselves to be subjected to
my various fumbling attempts to understand and explain phenomenol-
ogy. I have learned from them far more than they probably realize.
The philosophy department at West Virginia University (WVU) has
provided me with a happy and supportive environment in which to
teach and continue my research, and I am grateful to my colleagues,
especially to Richard Montgomery and Sharon Ryan, who have each
served as department chair during the writing of this book. I am also
grateful to WVU for granting me sabbatical leave in order to complete
this project.
On a more personal level, I should like to thank my parents, Anne
and Ralph, for their many years of love and support. My wife Lena and
my two boys, Henry and Lowell, deserve the greatest thanks; without
their love, understanding and inspiration, writing this book, like so
much else, would not have been possible.
David R. Cerbone
abbreviations ix
SP J. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of
Signs
SW E. Husserl, Husserl: Shorter Works
TE J.-P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Con-
sciousness
TI E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity
WD J. Derrida, Writing and Difference
x understanding phenomenology
introduction
Opening exercises
2 understanding phenomenology
tinction we are trying to delineate between what we see and our seeing
of it. To concentrate on the latter, to focus ones attention not so much
on what one experiences out there in the world but on ones experience
of the world, is to take the first step in the practice of phenomenology.
The word phenomenology means the study of phenomena, where the
notion of a phenomenon coincides, roughly, with the notion of experi-
ence. Thus, to attend to experience rather than what is experienced is
to attend to the phenomena.
Considerable care is needed in spelling out this talk of attending to
experience, since there are directions we could go in that would very
quickly take us away entirely from the domain of phenomenology. Let us
stick for a moment with the example of the blurriness brought on by the
removal of my glasses. One way I might attend to that experience is to
begin to investigate the causes of the change in the character of my visual
experience. I may begin to wonder just why it is that my vision becomes
blurry, just what it is about the structure of my eye, for example, that is
responsible, or what it is about the glasses I wear that removes the blur-
riness. Such an investigation, while no doubt interesting and extremely
important for some purposes, would lead us away from the experience
itself, and so away from phenomenology. Phenomenology, by contrast,
invites us to stay with what I am calling here the experience itself , to
concentrate on its character and structure rather than whatever it is
that might underlie it or be causally responsible for it. But what might
we learn or discern by staying with the experience itself? What kind of
insights might we glean and why might they matter philosophically? Of
course, the answers to these questions will be canvassed in considerable
detail throughout this book, but for now a sketch will suffice.
Let us resume our exercise, now concentrating on the description of
our experience. In doing so, we may begin to notice a few things. First
of all, and as has already been noted, your current visual experience is
of something: a page of this book, the words on the page and so forth.
These objects are an integral part of your experience in the sense that
it would not be the experience it is were it not to involve these objects.
(Although phenomenology asks us to concentrate on our experience,
on how things appear to us, to remain faithful to the character of that
experience, we must not neglect or distort the idea that such appear-
ances are largely appearances of things.) At the same time, these objects
are not literally a part of your experience in the way that the pages of
the book are a part of the book. (This observation indicates that the
relation between experience and its objects requires special attention,
as it cannot be accommodated by the usual understandings of part
4 understanding phenomenology
That is, one can delineate those structures experience must have in order
to be experience (of that kind). In this respect, and here we introduce
more technical vocabulary, phenomenology aims to be a transcendental
enterprise, concerned with articulating the conditions of the possibil-
ity of experience or intentionality (unpacking just what this means will
occupy us in the chapters to come).
To begin to name names, I have so far developed our opening
introductory exercise primarily along the lines of the phenomenolo-
gist Edmund Husserl (18591938), who initiated the kind of phenom-
enological philosophy we shall be examining throughout this book.
Phenomenology begins with Husserl, but it by no means ends there.
Although its subsequent practitioners are collectively inspired by, and
indebted to, Husserl, many branch off in different directions, sometimes
in ways that complement his original vision, and sometimes in ways that
more properly amount to rejection or repudiation. The details of both
Husserls project and its development and criticism by some of those
who inherit phenomenology from him will occupy us in the chapters to
come. For now, I want to continue with our exercise in ways that sketch
out some of these continuations.
In reflecting on the perceptual experience of the book, we have thus
far been concentrating on that experience as it unfolds from moment
to moment, noting how the particular moments hang together by
pointing towards other possibilities of experience (e.g. the page and
book from other angles). All of these moments are bound together by,
among other things, their all being of or about one particular thing:
the book that is the object of this visual experience. One way we can
continue the exercise is by broadening the horizons of our reflection, by
locating both the object of this experience and the activity in which you
were, and still are (I hope!), engaged: reading. To say that a book is the
object (or content) of your perceptual experience is to ascribe to your
experience a particular meaning or significance, that is, your experience
has the meaning book or perhaps book here in front of me (we need
not worry about the completeness of any of these specifications). Now,
just as any given moment of experience intimates further possibilities
of experience beyond that moment, so too the fact that your current
experience has this significance points beyond the confines of this cur-
rent experience. That is, your current experience is not of or about a
mere object, something whose sole description is that it takes up space
or manages to take up just this much of your field of vision; rather, it
is a thing charged with a very particular, determinate significance it
is a book. That it is a book signifies, among other things, its having a
6 understanding phenomenology
the print, the spacing of the words, the dimensions of the pages and so
on. Your bodily existence is not just intimated in your experience of
the book, but is more directly manifest. In looking at the page, you are
probably peripherally aware of your hands holding the book; you may
also dimly discern the outlines of your glasses or the tip of your nose.
Your attention may shift, gradually or abruptly, if you feel a sudden
twinge or if your fingers gripping the book begin to fall asleep. Your
body is not just present as a further object of perception, but is also
manifest as active and perceiving: when you pick up the book, your
hands take hold of the book and bring it into position to be read more
or less automatically; periodically, you reach down (or up, if you are
reading lying down, with the book above your head) to turn the page,
your fingers gripping the corner of the page without awaiting a cue
from an active intellect (like waiters who quietly refill your glass before
you have noticed its emptiness). The bodily character of experience
is a principal concern of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (190861), although
as we shall see, many of his insights trace back to ideas already being
worked out by Husserl.
If we take stock of the various ways in which we have developed our
opening exercise, we may note a number of underlying points of com-
monality that serve to unite the four figures mentioned. Most prominent
is the common concern with the notion of experience, of things showing
up or being manifest. Phenomenology is precisely concerned with the
ways in which things show up or are manifest to us, with the shape and
structure of manifestation. Perception, on which we have been concen-
trating, is one form of manifestation, but not the only one (some things,
such as numbers and equations, are most genuinely manifest purely
intellectually). A guiding claim of phenomenology is that the structure
of manifestation, of intentionality, is neither arbitrary nor idiosyncratic;
rather, the claim is that there is an essential structure, irrespective of
whatever the causal underpinnings of experience turn out to be. A fur-
ther commitment at work in phenomenologys concern to delineate the
essential structures of experience is that these structures must be delin-
eated in such a way that they are themselves made manifest in experi-
ence. This additional commitment further underscores the point that the
interest phenomenology takes in experience is markedly different from
the kind that proposes hypotheses about the causes of our experience.
Phenomenologys general disregard for causes is symptomatic of a
further point of agreement: its opposition to what is perhaps the most
dominant trend in contemporary philosophy (which was also a heavy
hitter at the time of Husserl), namely naturalism. Such a view, which
8 understanding phenomenology
physical object appears to overlook entirely the idea that the I picks
out a subject of experience: a being to whom the world is present and
who is present to himself. Again, recall our exercise. When you reach
to turn the page of the book, you are not present to yourself as one
more physical object among others; you experience yourself as actively
engaged with the world, and, with suitable reflection, you experience
yourself as having experience. That is, you can become reflectively aware
of the fact that the world is manifest to you in various ways. Moreover,
that you encounter a book, an item whose significance intimates a whole
array of purposes and activities, belies the idea that the world manifest
in experience is merely the physical world, the world that can be exhaus-
tively characterized in the terms of the physical sciences.
Where Quine, and thus scientific naturalism, begins is altogether
different from the starting-point of phenomenology. The disparity can
be further documented by comparing the passage I cited from Quine
with one from Husserl, where he offers a description of what he calls
the natural attitude, by which he means our ordinary conscious aware-
ness of ourselves and the world around us. Husserl begins as well with
the first-person declarative I am , but how he continues is markedly
different. Notice in particular the differences between Husserls descrip-
tion and that provided by Quine, especially how Husserls description
seeks to capture the content and quality of his own experience, while
Quines simply passes it by. Notice also that nothing Husserl says con-
tradicts or repudiates any of Quines claims (the differences and disa-
greements between phenomenology and naturalism are more subtle).
Husserl writes:
10 understanding phenomenology
one
from which the basic concepts and ideal laws of pure logic flow, and back
to which they must be traced (LI: 249). Pure phenomenology repre-
sents a field of neutral researches (ibid.), which means that phenom-
enology is to proceed without the aid of any unexamined assumptions;
phenomenology is to be a presuppositionless form of enquiry (see e.g.
LI: 2636). Around 1905, however, Husserl described his conception of
phenomenology as undergoing radical dramatic changes. At this point,
Husserl began to think of phenomenology in transcendental terms, and
emphasized to an even greater degree the idea of phenomenology as a
pure discipline. The meaning and import of the two key terms tran-
scendental and pure will occupy us considerably over the course of
this chapter, as they serve to underwrite what he saw as his principal
methodological innovation: the phenomenological reduction (which
is foreshadowed in Logical Investigations, but only explicitly articulated
following Husserls transcendental turn). Husserls revised conception
of phenomenology is evident in his 1907 lectures, published as The Idea
of Phenomenology, as well as in his 1911 manifesto, Philosophy as Rig-
orous Science, which contains another attack on naturalism in philoso-
phy. In 1913, Husserl published the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a
Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (hereafter
Ideas). There would eventually be two further volumes, although neither
of them would be published during Husserls lifetime.
The remainder of Husserls philosophical career was spent develop-
ing, refining and reconceiving transcendental phenomenology. Husserl
repeatedly characterized himself as a beginner in phenomenology,
12 understanding phenomenology
and many of his works reflect this, not by being amateurish but by their
willingness to reopen the question of just what phenomenology is and
how it is to be practised. Husserls perpetual rethinking of phenomenol-
ogy translated also into hesitation and delays with respect to publica-
tion. Following the publication of Ideas in 1913, other works appeared
only sporadically. Among them are Formal and Transcendental Logic
in 1929, Cartesian Meditations in 1931 and The Crisis of the European
Sciences in 1936.
Husserl died in 1938. His final years following his retirement from a
chair in philosophy at Freiburg were rather unhappy ones. The rise of the
Nazis in Germany meant that Husserl, owing to his Jewish ancestry, was
barred from any kind of official academic activity. Carried along by the
wave of Nazism was one of Husserls most promising followers, Martin
Heidegger, who joined the party in the early 1930s (in the early 1940s,
the dedication to Husserl in Heideggers Being and Time was quietly
deleted, only to be restored in the 1950s). The political situation was
not the sole cause of Husserls unhappiness, however. As he grew older,
Husserl lamented both the incompleteness of his own achievements
in phenomenology and the lack of any obvious successor (Heidegger,
among others, having clearly failed to take up the banner, or at least
not in the right way).
Although Husserl did not publish a great many works in the last
twenty-five years of his life, this was not from lack of writing. Husserl
left nearly 30,000 pages (in shorthand!) of manuscripts. Slowly these are
being edited and published, both in their original German and in Eng-
lish translation. These include the second and third volumes of Ideas,
as well as Experience and Judgment, a companion to his Formal and
Transcendental Logic. When one combines the manuscripts with the
published works, Husserls philosophy becomes nearly unsurveyable,
and certainly not something that can be adequately accounted for in
one chapter of an introductory work. We shall concentrate, as Husserl
often does, on a small handful of examples. In doing so, I hope to cap-
ture the overall feel of Husserls phenomenology, thereby conveying
its principal methods, aspirations and achievements.
From this brief synopsis of Husserls life and works we can extract two
concerns that, especially when combined with a third, account for
the particular character of his phenomenology, both in its methods
14 understanding phenomenology
Now consider even these sorts of claims concerning the characteris-
tics and behaviour of populations of sentient beings: when the naturalist
makes these claims, he typically puts them forward as being true, but
what does this mean? It is obvious, Husserl thinks, that the naturalist
intends more than to claim that this is how he and perhaps his fellow
naturalists happen to think; indeed, the naturalist does not intend to say
anything about his psychological states and processes at all. Rather, the
naturalist intends to discover, and put forward, what is ultimately the
truth about such things as psychological states and processes, without
reference to any of his own psychological states and processes whatso-
ever, but this means that the notion of truth itself cannot be understood
in terms of psychological states and processes. In this way, the naturalist,
in his official position, courts self-refutation by depriving himself of the
very notion of truth that guides his scientific aspirations. (Unofficially,
we might say, the naturalist can be seen to be guided by such a notion of
truth after all, and Husserls arguments are primarily designed to make
this clear to the naturalist himself.)
One aspect of Husserls anti-naturalism, then, is his rejection of the
idea that logic can be understood psychologically; the doctrine com-
monly known as psychologism is ultimately self-refuting, and in so
far as naturalism traffics in psychologism, it too totters on the brink of
absurdity. What, though, does this concern with the nature and status
of logic have to do with the notions of consciousness and intentionality?
After all, the latter two notions, especially that of consciousness, appear
to be psychological notions, and so any rejection of psychologism with
respect to logic would appear irrelevant to arriving at a proper under-
standing of them. While there are other, relatively independent aspects
of Husserls anti-naturalism that play a role in his particular way of
approaching the notions of consciousness and intentionality, there is
a connection between his rejection of psychologism in logic and his
conception of how consciousness and intentionality ought to be studied.
Although logic is independent of thinking in the sense that logical laws
bear a normative relation to any actual thought processes, at the same
time the very category of thought is bound up with the idea of logi-
cal structure. That a particular psychological process merits the label
thinking or that a particular psychological state the label thought
indicates its having a logical structure: the state or process involves
ideal contents that can be logically related, for example inferentially, to
other states and processes with such contents. In so far as psychological
states and processes partake of such ideal structures and contents, that
is, in so far as they achieve the status of thinking and thoughts, then
16 understanding phenomenology
thoughts is about Plato and Aristotle (and about the former being the
teacher of the latter). For Husserl, following Brentano, intentionality is
the mark of the mental, and so we can see him as generalizing these
remarks about thought to the notion of conscious experience in its
entirety. All conscious experience, in so far as it exhibits intentionality,
has an essential structure that is independent of the empirical particu-
lars of any being whose experience it is. Given this independence, the
essential structure of experience cannot be understood naturalistically,
that is, in terms of the empirical psychological states and processes that
might be causally responsible for beings having such experience.
The role played by this notion of essential structure for Husserl indi-
cates another aspect of his anti-naturalism. The essential structure of
experience is the structure that experience has in virtue of which it
is experience, which for Husserl means in virtue of which experience
exhibits intentionality. As such, the notion of essential structure plays a
distinctive explanatory role that cannot, Husserl thinks, be taken over
by the natural sciences. This role can be discerned in a question raised
by Husserl in his manifesto-like essay of 1911, Philosophy as Rigorous
Science, the lions share of which consists of a polemic against what he
sees as the prevailing naturalism of his day. The question Husserl raises
is: How can experience as consciousness give or contact an object?
(PCP: 87). Husserls appeal to the notions of giving and contacting
indicates that the question concerns the possibility of the intentional-
ity of experience: how does experience come to be of or about objects?
Such how-possible questions are transcendental questions, and Husserl
thinks that such questions are beyond the scope of the natural sciences.
This is so because the natural sciences, no matter how sophisticated, still
operate within what Husserl calls the natural attitude: our ordinary
stance with respect to the world that takes for granted or presupposes
the givenness of objects. Science, in its attempts to locate the most basic
constituents of reality and delineate their causal structure, partakes of
such presuppositions, just as much as we do in everyday life. As Husserl
puts it, the natural sciences, and the natural attitude more generally, are
naive. To say that the natural sciences and the natural attitude are naive
does not mean that there is anything wrong with them. (Husserl is no
opponent of the natural sciences, nor of the natural attitude, but only
of naturalism, which is, we might say, a metaphysical interpretation of
the natural attitude.) The charge of naivet only indicates a limitation,
not an error, on the part of the natural attitude and the natural sciences;
the charge indicates that there are questions that are in principle beyond
their reach.
18 understanding phenomenology
on. What makes some conditions worse is that they are misleading or
inaccurate. Under these conditions, the rock only seems to be one way
or another, whereas it really is some other way. For example, if I view
a whitish-grayish rock under a red light, it will appear to be more pink
than it really is. The point of these considerations is that in the case of
physical objects a distinction between is and seems is both readily avail-
able and generally applicable.
Husserl argues that when it comes to consciousness, these essential
features of physical objects can be seen to be lacking (see PCP: 1037). If
we shift from the rock I am perceiving to my perceiving of it, it becomes
apparent that we cannot transfer many of the things we noted about
the rock to my experience of it. Start with the notion of perspective.
Although the rock presents itself from one side or another, this is not
the case with my perception of it. The rock, we might say, appears in my
experience of it, but my experience is not presented to me in a further
appearance. My experience just is the presentation of things such as the
rock, and nothing more. Unlike the rock, my experience is not available
from a variety of perspectives. I cannot turn around my experience in
the way that I can turn the rock, seeing it now from one side, now from
another. Indeed, my experience, unlike the rock, does not have sides
at all. Unlike the rock, which admits of endless possible presentations or
appearances, the appearance is exhausted by its appearing. If this is so,
then the phenomena of which consciousness consists do not admit of
the isseems distinction. There is nothing more to the appearance than
its seeming the way it is; there is no way it might really be in contrast to
how it appears. While the rock might look blurry, but really have sharp,
smooth edges, this is not the case with my blurry experience of the rock
(when I restore my glasses, I have a new experience, rather than a new
perspective on the old one).
The collapse of the isseems distinction in the case of conscious
phenomena points to a further disanalogy between physical objects
(and the natural world more generally) and consciousness. This fur-
ther disanalogy is epistemological in nature: it concerns the differ-
ences with respect to knowledge and certainty that are available in these
respective domains. I said before that the rock was something that, as a
physical object, admitted of an endless series of possible presentations.
This means, among other things, that no one experience presents or
takes in the rock in its entirety: there is always something further to
see, some other way to see it. To use Husserls terminology, any per-
ceptual experience of things like the rock will always be inadequate,
which means that there will always be sides that may be intimated by
20 understanding phenomenology
that are unobservable, for example in the domain of microphysics. It
is not surprising, then, that scientific hypotheses are always proposed
as tentative, open to revision and defeasible by alternatives. Phenom-
enology, by contrast, focuses precisely on what is given in experience,
eschewing entirely the method of formulating hypotheses and drawing
inferences from what is given to what lies behind or beyond it. For Hus-
serl, phenomenology is to adhere strictly to what he calls the principle
of all principles:
22 understanding phenomenology
isolating ourselves physically from the environing world. Any of these
manoeuvres will, for the most part, deprive the would-be phenomenolo-
gist of much of the raw material for his investigation for which the flow
of experience must continue unabated. Rather than an alteration in the
flow of experience, the principal change heralded by the performance
of the reduction is a shift in attention on the part of the one whose
experience it is. When I perform the reduction, I no longer attend to
the worldly objects of my experience, nor do I wonder about the causal
underpinnings of that experience; instead, I focus my attention on the
experience of those worldly objects. I pay attention to the presentation of
the world around me (and myself), rather than to what is presented. The
reduction is thus a kind of reflection: for Husserl, the realm of reflection
is the fundamental field of phenomenology (Ideas I: 50).
Phenomenological description
The performance of the reduction is only the first step in Husserls phe-
nomenology, as it prepares the way by focusing the phenomenological
investigators attention exclusively on the flow of his experience. (We
have, in the phenomenological reduction, the more formal and rigorous
articulation of the shift sketched out in our opening exercise in the
Introduction.) Once the standpoint of the reduction has been attained,
the investigator can then set about answering the kinds of questions
Husserl considers phenomenology ideal to answer. Again, these ques-
tions concern the essential structures of experience. What structure
must experience have in order to be experience? How is it possible for
conscious experience to reach or contact an object? How, in other
words, is intentionality possible?
I want to approach Husserls answers to these sorts of questions by
working carefully through a particular example. We have so far confined
ourselves to cases that centre on visual experience (reading this book,
looking at a rock), but I should like now to consider an example centred
on auditory experience. The example will be developed along the lines of
Husserls own discussion in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness
of Internal Time, much of which is devoted to carefully describing and
dissecting the experience of hearing a melody. Following Husserls more
elaborate description and analysis, I want us to explore the experience
of hearing a melody with an eye towards answering the following ques-
tions, which can be understood as instantiating the general questions
enumerated above:
24 understanding phenomenology
note at t3 and the fourth note at t4. If one were instead to hear all four
notes all at once, ones experience would be not of or about Beethovens
Fifth, but of a slightly dissonant chord. Successiveness would thus appear
to be an essential aspect of ones experience in order to have this par-
ticular kind of experience. (We shall return to this idea of successiveness
and what it involves after we have pressed on a bit further.)
Hearing one note after the other, rather than all at once, is not, how-
ever, sufficient for having an experience with the content hearing the
opening of Beethovens Fifth. As one hears each succeeding note, ones
experience of the preceding note(s) must, in one sense, cease: if one
continues to hear the previous notes, then the succession will amount
not to a melody, but to a slowly building cluster of sounds, one on top
of the other, much like the effect of holding down the right-most pedal
on the piano while striking the notes. It is crucial, then, that with the
experience of the sounding of each successive note in the opening, the
experience of the sounding of the preceding note must cease. How-
ever (and here things get a bit more slippery), the experience of the
previous notes must not be erased entirely. If, with the experience of
each successive note, the experience of the previous notes was forgot-
ten (and no experience with respect to upcoming notes was in any way
expected), then ones experience would not add up to a melody. It
would be an experience of a note, then an experience of another note,
then an experience of yet another note, and then an experience of yet
another note after that. Even this characterization is somewhat mislead-
ing, since from the point of view of the one whose experience it is, the
notes would not even be experienced as one, then another or as one
after another. To the extent that we can comprehend it, the experience
would be an even more radical version of the condition suffered by the
main character in the film, Memento: a note would sound, only to be
immediately forgotten.
To add up to a melody, the experience of each note must in some
way be remembered as further notes are experienced. Remembered
is not quite right here, and for a number of reasons. First, remembering
has connotations of calling something to mind: reproducing a prior
experience in ones memory for further inspection and contemplation.
But that is not a fair characterization of what happens in the case of
hearing a melody. If one called to mind the previous notes with the
sounding of each note, then the experience would again be a slowly
building cluster, and so the previously experienced notes would get in
the way of the one being experienced as currently sounding. A second
connotation of remembering also indicates its inappropriateness here.
26 understanding phenomenology
second note in isolation is very different from hearing it within the
larger melody. In the latter case, the experience of the other notes is
part of the experience of that one note as currently sounding, whereas
this is not so in the case where the single note is struck with noth-
ing surrounding it. That any given moment of experience involves
more than what is being experienced as currently present indicates
the horizonal structure of experience. As one note in the melody is
experienced as currently sounding, the just-experienced and the still-
to-be-experienced notes are part of the horizon of that moment of
experience; the current moment of experience points to those further
notes as retained or expected.
These moments of experience, with their respective horizons, add
up to a melody. When the last note sounds, we say not just that we
heard some notes, but that we heard one particular melody, such as the
familiar opening of Beethovens Fifth Symphony: the melody informs or
governs the experience of the particular notes. As one experiences each
passing note, retaining them as one goes and expecting further notes,
the moments of experience are joined together, their respective hori-
zons fused through what Husserl calls synthesis. Through synthesis,
the various moments of experience are united as being of or about, in
this case, one melody.
Let us pause to take stock. Our examination of the example of hearing
the opening notes of Beethovens Fifth Symphony has revealed a perhaps
surprising number of structures and structural relations retention,
protention, horizon and synthesis that provide at least preliminary
answers to our guiding questions. Recall that those questions concerned
the conditions of the possibility of a particular kind of experience. How
can experience be of or about a melody? What sort of structure must
experience have in order to be of or about a melody? According to
Husserl, experience must at least have a retentionalprotentional, syn-
thetichorizonal structure. Without that kind of structure one could
never experience a melody, no matter how many melodies happened
to be playing nearby. These structures are essential structures, Husserl
claims, since to imagine their absence is to negate the possibility of that
kind of experience. (More will be said about the role of the imagination
in Husserl shortly.)
Although we cannot do it justice here, there is another crucial
structural feature of experience that deserves mention, as it serves to
underwrite all the others mentioned thus far. In building up our char-
acterization of the experience of the opening of Beethovens Fifth Sym-
phony and the structures and relations that experience involves, we
28 understanding phenomenology
of the own peculiar sense of the physical thing nor a contingency of
our human constitution, that our perception can arrive at physical
things themselves only through mere adumbrations of them (Ideas
I: 42). Adumbrations, it should be stressed, are not isolated units of
experience. As was the case with the melody, the sides that are no longer
seen or are yet to be seen are still part of the current experience of the
side that I can see. That the rock has sides-to-be-seen contributes to
the horizon of the experience of the side facing me. As the rock turns,
there is a constant change in my visual experience, and yet there is a
kind of unity as well in so far as all of the presented sides are of the one
rock: here again, we can see the work of synthesis, holding together the
different individual moments of experience.
In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl calls the unifying of the adumbra-
tional moments of experience the synthesis of identification: all of the
various adumbrational presentations are united as presentations of the
one rock, the one melody and so on. The process of synthesizing the var-
ious moments of experience Husserl calls noesis. The rock in the one
case, the melody in the other, are, as synthetic unities, the meanings of
those respective stretches of experience. Husserl sometimes refers to this
meaning as the apprehension-form governing the successive moments
of experience making up the experience of the melody; another term he
uses is noema. The kind of work we have been doing with respect to
our various examples, exploring the process of synthesis and its hori-
Noema
The noema of a mental process (what Husserl also calls the sense or mean-
ing of the mental process) is that in virtue of which the process is directed to
an object, regardless of whether or not the object exists (my thoughts about
Santa Claus are as much about something (i.e. Santa Claus), as my thoughts
about Winston Churchill). The noema is thus to be sharply distinguished
from the object itself. To any given object there correspond myriad noemata,
depending on just how the object is meant, and there can also be noemata
that direct consciousness towards non-existent objects (such as Santa Claus).
This sharp distinction is essential to the efficacy of the phenomenological
reduction, whereby noematic structures can be examined in isolation from
any questions concerning the real existence of whatever objects these struc-
tures direct consciousness towards. For readers approaching phenomenol-
ogy from the perspective of analytic philosophy, Husserls conception of the
noema, with its sharp distinction between the sense or meaning of a mental
process and the object meant, is akin to Freges famous distinction between
sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). For Frege, two expressions may differ
in sense while having the same referent, as in his example of the morning
star and the evening star, both of which refer to the planet Venus.
30 understanding phenomenology
to the appearing of the rock in my perceptual experience: the appear-
ing of the rock is, and must be, via adumbrational presentations united
by the synthesis of identification. Only in this way can my perceptual
experience be of or about a rock; only in this way can my experience
intend a rock; only in this way can my experience have the content or
meaning rock. Constitution thus applies at the level of sense, that is,
it applies with respect to how my experience makes the kind of sense it
does, by being, for example, about enduring objects.
Phenomenology brings into view the systematic nature of objects at
the level of appearance or experience: objects are constituted as systems
of adumbrational presentations. The adumbrations form a system in
the sense that they are not arranged haphazardly. If I currently see one
side of the rock, then slowly turning it will reveal further sides in an
orderly, smoothly continuous way (provided I do not blink). If I turn
the rock slowly, I do not see the front side and then, immediately, the
back side, followed immediately again by the bottom side, followed
immediately by the presentation of the front of, say, my coffee cup. If my
experience were like that, then my experience would never reach or be
about objects; at best, my experience would be a chaotic play of images,
lacking entirely any sense of stability or predictability. There would be,
in Husserls words, no fixed and abiding unities.
There are distinctive notions of constitution in the case of each cat-
egory of objects, in the sense that different kinds of objects will be consti-
tuted differently. The constitution in experience of melodies, for example,
is different from the constitution of material objects (the latter, for exam-
ple, involve visual adumbrations and often olfactory ones, whereas heard
melodies involve neither). There is also what Husserl sometimes calls a
more pregnant notion of constitution, and this concerns the distinction
in experience between real and unreal objects. We might begin to get a
feel for this distinction by returning to the idea of objects understood at
the phenomenological level as systems of actual and possible adumbra-
tional presentations. If we consider the extent of such systems, we can
begin to recognize that there are no easily drawn limits. When I consider
the adumbrational presentation of the rock in my hand, there seems to be
no end to possible ways that it might present itself in my experience. Just
consider the different distances from which the rock might be viewed,
or the different angles; either of these is infinitely divisible. We can also
multiply indefinitely the possible times at which the rock may be viewed,
the variety of lighting conditions, and so on, so that there is a distinct
lack of finality with respect to our experience of even as mundane an
object as a rock. One consequence of this is that whenever I take it that
32 understanding phenomenology
element of experience, but considerable care is required, Husserl thinks,
to characterize the appearing ego properly. That is, the phenomeno-
logical reduction is not intended to be a mere psychological reduction,
focusing attention on my experience where my refers to a flesh-and-
blood human being (phenomenology, for Husserl, is not a matter of
introspection). The performance of the reduction applies equally to
the subject of experience as it does to the objects. When I suspend
any questions concerning the relation between conscious experience
and the environing world, that suspension extends all the way to ques-
tions concerning whose experience it is. I bracket the assumption or
presupposition that I am a worldly, materially real human being just as
much as I do the assumption that my experience is taking place within
a materially real world. (And by suspending any commitment to my
materiality, I do not thereby conceive of myself as an immaterial being
either. Despite his general admiration for Descartes, Husserl criticizes
him for failing to make the transcendental turn by treating the ego
revealed by the cogito as a little tag-end of the world (CM: 10).)
Although my existence as an empirically real being is bracketed, the
performance of the reduction does not render the stream of experience
subjectless. The reduced experience is still very much owned but only
by what Husserl calls the pure or transcendental ego, the subject of
experience considered only as a subject of experience. Such an ego is
always intimated by the ongoing flow of experience; the stream of expe-
rience always refers, however implicitly, to a subject whose experience
it is, even if the features of that subject are exhausted by the bare fact
of its having this particular stream of experience. We must be careful
here not to misconstrue Husserls talk of the revelation of the pure ego
within the performance of the reduction. The pure or transcendental
ego is not a second self or subject over and above my worldly subjectiv-
ity, as though that worldly subjectivity were in some way inhabited by
the pure ego in the way that a hand inhabits a glove. Rather, the pure
ego is the very same subject, only considered in abstraction from all of
the features that contribute to my empirically real existence. The pure
ego, we might say, is what is left over as given or manifest in experi-
ence, even if all of my beliefs about my empirically real existence were
false. Even in that extreme case, my experience would still carry with
it a sense of ownership, a sense of its being had by a subject. It is this
pure or abstract sense of having that Husserl intends to explore within
his phenomenology.
Just as objects are constituted within the flow of experience, so too
is the ego. As experience continues, moving in particular directions,
A second reduction
34 understanding phenomenology
ture? How can we know, for example, that what holds for seeing a rock
holds for seeing any material object? Might it not be possible that some
material objects are not given adumbrationally in perception? Might
there not be a creature that could take in a melody all at once? Husserl
himself no doubt feels the force of these questions, distinguishing as he
does between two stages of phenomenological investigation (see e.g.
CM: 13). The first stage involves the investigation of the field of experi-
ence opened up by the phenomenological reduction. At this point, the
phenomenologist is primarily concerned to describe attentively the flow
of this experience, noting its features and locating promising structures.
There is, however, a second stage what Husserl refers to as the criti-
cism of transcendental experience (CM: 13) and it is at this second
stage that claims concerning essences can be fully adjudicated.
Whereas at the first stage the phenomenological investigator plays
the role primarily of an observer with respect to his own experience, at
the second stage he more actively intervenes. That is, the investigator
freely varies his experience, using his imagination to introduce series
of changes in the course of his experience. Husserl calls this method of
free variation the eidetic reduction, from the Greek eidos, which means
idea or form. This second reduction is a kind of distillation, remov-
ing any of the arbitrary or contingent features of the experience so as
to isolate the necessary form or structure of experience. The investiga-
tor can in this way delineate the essential categories of experience, for
example perception, memory, desiring and so on.
To get a feel for how the eidetic reduction is supposed to work, let
us start, as Husserl does, with a particular example, returning again to
the perceptual experience of a rock. The rock is given in experience as
having a particular shape, colour, texture and so on. The rock shows
forth precisely as one particular thing, with its various features already
determined as actually being one way or another. The eidetic reduction
proceeds by treating all of these actualities as mere possibilities. The
investigator freely varies the colour of the rock, imagining it as blue,
green, magenta, yellow and so on, and similarly with the shape, texture,
size and other features. Since these variations are freely imaginable, they
all show themselves to be possibilities with respect to objects of percep-
tual experience: material objects may vary with respect to size, shape,
colour, texture, and so on. There will, however, be limits on these vari-
ations introduced into the perceptual experience, transitions where the
experience will break down entirely. Such transitions might occur when
the investigator tries to delete shape altogether or to imagine the rocks
having two colours covering the same area at the same time. The points
Transcendental idealism
Husserl conceives of phenomenology as a transcendental investigation,
whose guiding question is one of how it is possible for consciousness to
reach or contact an object. Often, this question is understood as a question of
transcendence, that is, a question concerning how consciousness manages
to gain access to, and knowledge of, objects lying outside its boundaries.
In some of his writings, such as Cartesian Meditations, Husserl argues that
phenomenology, fully thought out, reveals the question concerning the
possibility of transcending the sphere of consciousness to be a bogus one.
That is, if we consider the two possible standpoints from which the question
might be raised, we shall see that there is no question about transcendence
worth asking. From the standpoint of the natural attitude, the question of
how I, David Cerbone, get outside my sphere of consciousness in order to
reach the outer world is nonsensical. In so far as I understand myself as one
more human being, I have already conceived of myself as amid a realm of
objects and other sentient beings whose independent existence I take for
granted. If, however, I adopt the standpoint of the transcendental attitude,
that is, the standpoint of the phenomenological reduction, there again is no
genuine question of transcendence. From this standpoint, actually existing
objects are constituted immanently. With the performance of the eidetic
reduction, the standpoint of transcendental subjectivity encompasses all
possible sense, and so there is, strictly speaking, nothing outside the realm
of transcendental subjectivity. Husserl thus thinks that phenomenology
ultimately establishes the truth of transcendental idealism. He does not,
however, view his idealism as equivalent to the original Kantian variety. For
example, Husserl rejects Kants idea of a thing-in-itself as something beyond
the bounds of sense.
36 understanding phenomenology
attacks. Whereas the naturalist could only see laws of thought as apply-
ing to particular kinds of beings and varying as the empirical features
of the beings under investigation vary, whatever laws the eidetic reduc-
tion yields apply universally and necessarily, regardless of the empirical
make-up of the beings whose thought is under consideration.
For reasons that should be evident by this point, Husserl calls his phe-
nomenology pure or transcendental phenomenology. The qualifier
pure indicates the role of the phenomenological reduction as the all-
important first step in isolating the stream of conscious experience; the
purity of that stream is a function of the suspension of any questions
regarding the relation between experience and the environing world,
including, as we saw, even questions concerning the identity of the sub-
ject understood as a flesh-and-blood creature.
The most famous of the practitioners of phenomenology after Husserl
(Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) are often collectively referred to
as existential, as opposed to pure or transcendental, phenomenologists.
The change in the modifier indicates many more profound changes
in their respective conceptions of phenomenology. Despite the many
differences among their respective conceptions, the commonality of
the qualifier existential indicates a shared suspicion concerning the
legitimacy of the phenomenological reduction, at least as understood
by Husserl. Perhaps, this suspicion runs, something goes wrong when
one tries to isolate experience in this manner, to attend to it without
at the same time attending to the way in which that experience is sit-
uated more broadly; perhaps one needs to consider the question of
whose experience it is in the sense of a concrete subject of experi-
ence, rather than something abstract and anonymous. Heidegger, for
example, inveighs against Husserls attempt at purification, complaining
that it misconceives and then overlooks precisely what is most crucial
to phenomenology, what Husserl calls the natural attitude, which the
reduction suspends. Heidegger charges that mans natural manner of
experience cannot be called an attitude (HCT: 113), indicating that
this natural manner is not something one freely adopts or suspends.
According to Heidegger, mans natural manner of experience is not a
set of assumptions or presuppositions at all.
In his critique, Sartre focuses on Husserls conception of the ego
or self, challenging the validity of his phenomenological descriptions,
38 understanding phenomenology
two
40 understanding phenomenology
as the Gesamtausgabe. As might be expected, the precise nature of the
relation between Heideggers early and later work is something on which
scholars disagree. In some respects, Heidegger came to repudiate the
project embarked on in Being and Time, seeing his early claim that
ontology must begin with an account of human existence as still mired
in the subjectivism and anthropocentrism of the Western philosophical
tradition. One can also see both his sustained reflections on works of art
and his ruminations on the essence of technology as ways of question-
ing the adequacy of his earlier philosophical views. At the same time,
Being and Time sets the course for all of Heideggers later thinking, serv-
ing as a kind of touchstone and point of orientation. The question of
being is one that Heidegger never really abandons, and his later works,
although not called by him works of phenomenology, still bear the traces
of phenomenological philosophy. In his 1947 Letter on Humanism, for
example, he appeals to the essential help of phenomenological seeing
in order to think the truth of being (BW: 235). Moreover, his later
attempts to call to things in their nearness, his attempts to articulate
the fourfold in which human beings might strive to dwell, and his
efforts to alert us to the levelling effects of our reigning technological
understanding of being, among others, can be seen as echoes of his
phenomenological concern with that which shows itself (BT: 7).
For the remainder of this chapter, we shall attend almost exclusively
to Being and Time, drawing occasionally on some of the surrounding
lecture material. Although I shall not be offering anything like a com-
mentary on the work, my discussion will nonetheless follow roughly
the order of Heideggers presentation in Being and Time.
42 understanding phenomenology
that our explicit thoughts (again, in so far as we have them on these
matters) have not really managed to comprehend.
As an example, consider the following pair of instructions:
Despite the surface similarities, very few, if any of us, will confuse these
two instructions. By this, I do not mean only that we are unlikely to run
together toy surprises and prime numbers, but something further: very
few, if any of us, will so much as treat this pair of instructions as asking
us to do the same kind of thing. Looking for prime numbers and look-
ing for toy surprises are very different kinds of activity. An indication of
this is the puzzlement that would greet the following instruction:
Indeed, it is not immediately clear just what is being asked for in (c), and
if someone were to issue such an instruction, he or she would owe us an
explanation. Perhaps the person wants to know if the number of pieces of
cereal is a prime, or whether the total number of pieces can be divided into
prime numbered groups; perhaps the person is merely joking around.
The instruction need not be considered nonsensical, but what sense it has
does not register with the immediacy of the first two instructions.
Leaving aside (c), consider how we might respond to each of the
first two instructions. In response to (a), we might rummage around
in the cereal box, dump out the contents and sift through them and so
on. The searching is directed towards something concretely located in
space and time. In response to (b), we might avail ourselves of paper and
pencil, but the numbers we are looking for are not to be found there,
on the paper. Indeed, trying to specify the location of the numbers is
bound to lead to just the kind of philosophical discomfort that makes
evident the gap between pre-ontological and ontological understand-
ing. We may become entangled in interminable disputes as to what
prime numbers are, where they are and how their way of being dif-
fers from things like toy surprises (this history of Western philosophy
is littered with such debates), but the fact that we do not confuse such
things in practice shows that we have a competence with respect to
such things that outstrips our theorizing. This competence is precisely
what Heidegger wants to investigate and explicate in order to begin to
answer the question of being.
44 understanding phenomenology
pre-ontological understanding is not so much contained in consciousness
as it is manifest in Daseins (our) everyday activity. Hence, Heideggers
phenomenology, at least in its preliminary stages, is a phenomenology of
everydayness. A phenomenology of everydayness is squarely opposed to
Husserls pure phenomenology. Any attempt to isolate conscious experi-
ence will, Heidegger thinks, distort or elide the phenomena that are most
fundamental, that is, those phenomena within which the world and our
own existence are manifest. Rather than isolating conscious experience,
Heideggerian phenomenology seeks to interpret our everyday activity
(the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in inter-
pretation (BT: 7)), so as to make manifest the largely implicit structures
of intelligibility that inform that activity.
What does a phenomenology of everydayness reveal or make explicit?
This question may best be answered by considering at length a single
example. Working through the example will also bring into view some
further Heideggerian concepts, along with some of his notoriously idi-
osyncratic terminology.
Allow me to describe an activity in which I frequently engage: work-
ing in my study. My study is a familiar space to me, and its familiarity is
manifest in the way I enter and move around the room. I walk through
the doorway without needing to make any special adjustments or pay
special attention to the location of various items in my study. The lec-
tern holding my dictionary is immediately to my right as I enter, the
bookcases to the left. I walk past these items without usually needing to
make any conscious effort to avoid them. At the same time, these various
things are present to me, on hand for my use. On occasion, I will stop
to turn the page of the dictionary to prevent fading or I will look up a
word on my way to the desk; I may also stop to get a book off the shelf,
if it is something I think I shall need during the stretch of writing I am
planning to do. The bookcases and the lectern thus present themselves
as there to be used for my various projects. Other entities in the study
manifest themselves in similar fashion: desk, computer, chair, floor,
lights, pens, pencils, paper and so on. I encounter all of these things
not as discrete bits of matter or as physical objects, but as things of
use or equipment: what Heidegger calls the ready-to-hand. That is, I
identify these various things with reference to the ways in which they are
caught up in my ongoing activity. I encounter my computer, variously,
as something to write with, check my email on, or surf the Internet. I
occasionally reach out for my coffee cup or for a book while writing,
or I may simply stop to look around the room, resting my arms on the
arms of my chair, my feet flat on the floor.
46 understanding phenomenology
encounter is what it is only by standing in myriad referential relations
to one another, as well as our various activities, projects and purposes.
A hammer, for example, is something with which to hammer in nails in
order to hold pieces of wood together towards the building of something
for the sake of Daseins self-understanding as (say) a carpenter. (All of
the italicized terms are what Heidegger means by referential relations:
those relations in which items of equipment must stand in order to be
the equipment that it is.) What we encounter in our everyday activity
are not things that can be what they are regardless of the surrounding
contexture. Although we might try to picture a possible world contain-
ing nothing but a hammer (a hammer floating in space springs to mind
most readily), its being a hammer depends on things well beyond the
confines of such a world: nails, timber, the activities of hammering and
building, and projects such as building houses and furniture. Heidegger
says in Being and Time that taken strictly, there is no such thing as
an equipment (BT: 15). Any particular item or kind of equipment is
what it is only in so far as it belongs to a totality of equipment, which
in turn is informed by our activity.
Given the relational nature of equipment, the ontology of free-
standing substances with their own intrinsic properties is a far remove
from the phenomenology of everydayness. If we carefully and honestly
describe our everyday activity and what shows itself in that activity,
substances as understood by the philosophical tradition will generally
not appear as part of that description. Heideggers argument against
a substance-and-property ontology is not restricted, however, to this
point about descriptive adequacy. His deeper point concerns the ade-
quacy of a substance-and-property ontology, not just with respect to the
phenomenological contours of our everyday activity and experience,
but also with respect to its ability to explain those contours. That is,
Heidegger argues in Being and Time that if one starts with a substance-
and-property ontology, one will not be able to reach or recover the
ontology revealed in everydayness; instead, he argues that an ontology
of substances and properties (what he calls an ontology of the present-
at-hand) is an impoverished understanding of what there is, relative to
the ontology of the ready-to-hand. We can understand the ontology of
the present-at-hand by dimming down the ontology of the ready-to-
hand, that is, by considering things stripped of their referential relations
(Heidegger calls this way of considering things decontextualization),
but not vice versa, at least not without distortion and falsification.
If we return to the referential relations in which items of equipment
stand, it will be noticed that the terminus of these relations is always
48 understanding phenomenology
or self-understandings, is apt to give rise to the following worry: is
what shows itself in everyday activity inherently subjective, bound up
as it seems to be with my purposes, interests, projects, and desires? This
worry can be allayed by a number of observations. To begin with, even
if we confine our attention to my own everyday experience of my own
study, there are aspects of what shows up in that experience that cut
against its being inherently or exhaustively subjective. If we consider
all of those referential relations constituting the ready-to-hand, it will
be noticed that there is a normative dimension to these relations: a pen
is something for writing, a computer for typing or writing, a book for
reading and so on. The for in all of these cases indicates a proper or
standard use or purpose. Even if it is true that I can use a book to prop
open the door or bonk an unwanted visitor on the head, use a pen to
jab someone, or use my computer screen as a mirror to fix my hair,
these uses are deviant ones, and strike us as such when they are put to
these uses (being so struck may register, variously, as humour, shock or
admiration at someones ingenuity).
If we reflect further on the normative dimension of these referential
relations, we may also come to appreciate the anonymous character of
these normative relations. What I mean here is that the particular ways
in which I (or anyone else, for that matter) encounter my everyday sur-
roundings as normatively structured is not something that is up to me
or that I decide. I do not imbue books with the significance of being for
reading, pens for writing, and so on, but find them as having already
been endowed with those meanings, but not by anyone in particular.
Heidegger refers to this anonymous dimension of everyday existence as
das Man, sometimes translated as the they, but more aptly rendered
as the one or the anyone (Man in German just means one, as
in Man sagt auf Deutsch or One says in German ). Heidegger
says in Being and Time that das Man articulates the referential totality
of significance (BT: 27), which means that everydayness is first and
foremost structured by anonymous norms.
Heideggers guiding claim throughout his phenomenological explica-
tion of Dasein in its everydayness is that Daseins (our) way of being is
being-in-the-world, and these latest remarks concerning the anony-
mously articulated normative structure of our everyday experience
indicate that the world I or we encounter is a public world, rather than
something inherently private or subjective. While there is ample room
in Heideggers account for idiosyncratic appropriation and deviant uses,
not to mention invention and innovation, all of these possibilities are
themselves intelligible only against a background of taken-for-granted
50 understanding phenomenology
Husserl and the life-world
In his last published work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcenden-
tal Phenomenology, Husserl devotes considerable attention to the problem
of the life-world, his term for what is pregiven to us all quite naturally, as
persons within the horizon of our fellow men, i.e., in every actual connec-
tion with others, as the world common to us all (CES: 33). The life-world
is the constant ground of validity, an ever available source of what is taken
for granted, to which we, whether as practical men or as scientists, lay claim
as a matter of course (ibid.). By source and ground Husserl means that
the life-world serves as the basis for the possibility of the natural, objective
sciences. All theorizing, as the activity of scientists, takes for granted this
pre-theoretical, pre-scientific familiar world: objective science has a constant
reference of meaning to the world in which we always live (CES: 34). The
natural sciences can therefore neither discharge this presupposed life-world,
nor make it the proper object of scientific investigation. Instead, Husserl thinks
that a new kind of scientific investigation is called for, the rigorous science
of phenomenology. The life-world is fully amenable to phenomenological
investigation, via the technique of epoch, in this case applied doubly. The
phenomenological investigator first performs the reduction with respect to
the natural sciences, an abstaining from all participation in the cognitions of
the objective sciences (CES: 35). Performing this first reduction more clearly
delineates the pre-theoretical, pre-scientific dimensions of experience, which
can themselves be subjected to a total or transcendental epoch, where
the investigator simply forbids himself as a philosopher, in the uniqueness
of his direction of interest to continue the whole natural performance
of his world-life (CES: 41). The correlation between world and world-
consciousness (ibid.) ensures the efficacy of this more complete reduction.
Although the general shape of Husserls interest in the life-world suggests a
greater proximity to Heideggers phenomenology, Husserls appeals to the
life-world as amenable to the performance of the reduction, as something
correlated with world-consciousness, as something taken for granted or
presupposed, make clear the continued divergence between their respec-
tive conceptions of phenomenology. Indeed, Heideggers objections to Hus-
serls characterizations of the life-world precede those characterizations by
several years: in Being and Time, Heidegger already criticizes the doctrine
that the subject must presuppose and indeed always does unconsciously
presuppose the presence-at-hand of the external world (BT: 43). With such
presuppositions, Dasein always comes too late, such that the primordial
phenomenon of being-in-the-world has been shattered (ibid.).
52 understanding phenomenology
my books, which in turn show up as to be read; my chair in the corner
shows up as the place where I read; and so on. If I were to try to strip
away these various significations, all of these ways in which the world
I experience bears the stamp of my projects, purposes and interests,
then it is not clear that anything would show up at all. It is tempting to
say that I would encounter a bare array of objects, devoid of purpose
or significance, but even delineating an array of objects, individuated
and separated from one another, bespeaks some practical significance,
however minimal, as, say, potential obstacles.
Heidegger summarizes the care-structure with the following formula:
The being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-already-in (the-world) as
being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world) (BT: 41).
Unpacking this formula will take us further into Heideggers analysis of
Daseins way of being, affording us a deeper insight into the connection
between things being manifest and their mattering. In the process, we
shall also get a glimpse (but only a glimpse) into the reasoning behind
Heideggers claim that being, both Daseins and that of other entities as
well, is ultimately to be understood in terms of time.
Heideggers formula contains three moments or aspects, which can
be described and analysed in relative independence, even if the three
are ultimately inseparable from one another. The three aspects are:
1. ahead-of-itself;
2. already-in (the-world); and
3. being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).
The order in which Heidegger arranges these aspects, such that ahead-
of-itself precedes already-in, may initially seem rather odd, but the
order is important as it serves to underline Daseins distinctive way of
being.
The first aspect, ahead-of-itself , corresponds to what Heidegger
labels understanding or projection (here, understanding is being
used in a more specific, technical sense than it has been in our discus-
sion until this point). Dasein is always ahead of itself in so far as it is
always projecting itself in terms of some for-the-sake-of or other. Con-
sider one such for-the-sake-of: my being a professor. Being a professor
is not merely some standing fact or static property of me, the way my
weight or hair colour might be, nor is being a professor some goal out
there in the future that I might someday reach, so as then to make it a
standing fact or static property. Being a professor is neither of these,
but rather is something in terms of which I organize my activities (at
54 understanding phenomenology
past experience and so on. Indeed, mood, for Heidegger, is the principal
manifestation of Befindlichkeit. We typically find ourselves in moods,
that is, we do not choose them from some neutral, moodless standpoint
or position. Befindlichkeit and mood are bound up with what Heidegger
calls thrownness, which underlines the idea that our being-in-the-
world and many of its particular features in each case are not a matter of
choice or decision. Put colloquially, we do not choose to be born, nor to
be born into the particular circumstances in which we grow up. For each
of us, our past our upbringing, past experiences, dispositions, inclina-
tions conditions the way in which we confront any particular situation,
and so conditions the ways in which situations are manifest to us. At the
same time, our past is not something static and fixed in its givenness,
but is itself dynamically affected by how we project ourselves onto our
possibilities. The significance of what I have done or experienced in the
past (or am currently doing and experiencing, for that matter) is greatly
affected by what I go on to do. Something that I currently consider a mis-
fortune, for example, or a terrible mistake, may later take on the signifi-
cance of happy accident or prescient decision on my part. Befindlichkeit
thus names the historical nature of Dasein. Each of us has a history, not
just as an accumulation of facts concerning past events and experiences,
but as something that pervades and conditions our self-understandings,
which in turn pervade and condition that history.
The third, and final, aspect, being-alongside (entities encountered
within-the-world), corresponds to what Heidegger calls falling. Fall-
ing names my current absorption in whatever it is that I am doing.
Dasein is always falling in so far as it is always caught up in some kind
of ongoing activity, even when it is just idly musing or killing time.
Falling is conditioned by understanding and Befindlichkeit: my current
activity is informed by the self-understanding in terms of which I am
projecting myself, as well as by the mood and dispositions I bring, so to
speak, to that current activity. When I sit down to write, for example, I
do so in terms of my self-understanding as a philosophy professor, and
I bring to the activity of writing the mood I find myself in. On any given
day, I may confront the activity of writing with, variously, an eagerness
to press on, dread at the prospect of having to work out sentence by
sentence what Befindlichkeit means, reluctance because of a desire to
be doing something else and so on.
Having sketched each of these three aspects, we can now return
briefly to the issue of their being ordered as they are. The peculiarity of
the ordering becomes apparent when we notice that each of the three
aspects carries a temporal connotation: understanding, understood as
56 understanding phenomenology
Being and Time is undeniably incomplete (Heidegger envisaged a third
division, the three resulting divisions making up but Part One of a two-
part work; Part Two was itself to consist of a further three divisions).
We shall not consider this unfinished project here, but instead confine
ourselves to some of the broader features of the first task of Division
Two (although even this will allow for some further aspects of tempo-
rality to emerge).
Taken as a whole, Division One, and so Heideggers account of
Dasein in its everydayness, contains a rather puzzling tension. On the
one hand, the structures revealed and analysed in Division One the
world as a referential totality, das Man and the structural moments
of the care-structure (understanding, Befindlichkeit, and falling) are
absolutely essential to the idea that Dasein is a being whose being is an
issue for it. Minus those structures, Dasein would be reduced to a mere
thing that does not in any way confront its own existence. On the other
hand, Heidegger also claims that Daseins absorption in its everyday
existence tends to occlude the very idea that Daseins being is an issue
for it. This is especially evident in his account of das Man: the kind of
anonymous normative authority that pervades everyday life. Everyday
Dasein, according to Heidegger, is in thrall to this anonymous author-
ity, acquiescing to it almost reflexively and so falling into line with all
the others. Such conformity extends beyond such benign instances as
gripping a hammer or tying ones shoes to the very core of ones sensi-
bilities: everyday Dasein, Heidegger says, is a Man-self, an anyone, and
so in a deep sense a nobody as well. Driven by an inordinate concern
with how it measures up in relation to others (a phenomenon that
Heidegger calls distantiality), Dasein tends in everydayness towards
a kind of averageness. Everything is held in common and commonly
understood simply because everything has been levelled down to
this average understanding. Although even in everydayness we are all
individuated in a numerical sense, our immersion in, and identifica-
tion with, this anonymous normative structure means that we lack any
genuine sense of individuality. We have, in everydayness, surrendered
our existence to the tyranny of das Man, allowing it to determine and
evaluate the shape of our lives. By toeing the line and going with the
flow, we fail to give proper heed to our own capacities for self-deter-
mination.
We need to be clear here that the tension is not a contradiction, and
we might see this by considering the particular case of speaking a lan-
guage as illustrative of just these two dimensions. Speaking a language
requires, among other things, a rather high degree of conformity of
58 understanding phenomenology
These observations about language make it clear that in trying to
understand Heideggers distinction between inauthenticity and authen-
ticity, we need to be careful to avoid understanding the latter as the
achievement of some kind of radical isolation or eccentricity, akin to the
condition of a hermit who shuns society altogether. When we manage to
speak for ourselves, to give voice to the particularities of our individual
experience rather than parrot platitudes and received opinion, we do
not speak a different language. Speaking for myself does not require that
I give up English in exchange for a currently (for me) foreign tongue,
nor that I deliberately and pervasively distort and violate the rules of
English grammar. Heidegger notes late in Being and Time that with the
achievement of authenticity, the world which is ready-to-hand does
not become another one in its content, nor does the circle of others get
exchanged for a new one (BT: 60). Whatever kind of modification
authenticity is, it is not a wholesale repudiation of ones present social
condition, nor just a matter of being weird or unconventional.
Absorbed in familiar routines, a creature of habit, everyday Dasein
is lost, dispersed, as Heidegger puts it, into the world and into das
Man. As lost, Dasein is inauthentic, a translation of uneigentlich,
which more literally means unowned. Dasein, as inauthentic, fails to
own itself, and so fails to face up to its own existence as an issue for it.
In so far as it considers them at all, everyday Dasein takes the patterns
and routines in which it is immersed as given and final, as exhaustive
of its existence. To make the transition to authenticity, to the state or
condition of being self-owned, something must occur that disrupts the
patterns and routines that have everyday Dasein in their grip. Heidegger
calls the moment of disruption anxiety (Angst), and, fittingly, the last
chapter of Division One of Being and Time contains a lengthy phenom-
enological explication of this pivotal notion.
Anxiety is qualitatively akin to fear (indeed, in German Angst can
just mean fear), although it differs from fear in the following, cru-
cial respect: fear always has an object (when I am afraid, I am afraid
of something, someone, some event or eventuality), but anxiety lacks
one. The experience of anxiety is in part unsettling precisely because
of the absence of any specifiable object to which the experience can be
traced. More dramatically, in anxiety the world and all that it contains
fall away as irrelevant, as no longer making a claim on ones attention
or concern. This is not a matter of blacking out, so that in anxiety one
simply ceases to see ones surroundings, but more a matter of detach-
ment and disaffection; the world and what it has to offer registers as
entirely without import or appeal. Heidegger says in Being and Time,
60 understanding phenomenology
ostensibly impossible formulation? To answer this question, consider
first the following remark from Heideggers discussion of death in Being
and Time: In accordance with its essence, this possibility [death] offers
no support for becoming intent on something, picturing to oneself
the actuality which is possible, and so forgetting its possibility (BT:
53). What this remark indicates is that in our thinking about death we
conceive of it as a kind of distant actuality: something that will occur
some time in the future. In other words, we tend to think of death as a
possibility in the sense in which it is possible that it will rain tomorrow,
but since, unlike the case of tomorrows possible rain, we find nothing
to picture or imagine (again, I am dead contains nothing genuinely
thinkable), we lapse into a kind of forgetfulness about death. As only a
distant actuality, death has nothing to do with my existence now.
We have seen already that the sense of possibility in play when
Heidegger talks of Daseins being its possibilities does not follow the
standard logic of possibility and actuality, that is, Daseins possibili-
ties are not merely states or events that are not-yet-actual. Dasein is
its possibilities, which is to say that Dasein is projecting itself onto,
and in accordance with, particular understandings of what it is to be.
But what does it mean to speak of death as a possibility in this sense?
How can death be a way to be? And what is gained with respect to
authenticity by thinking of death in these terms? To say that death is
a possibility in Heideggers sense is to say that death is a kind of self-
understanding in terms of which Dasein can project itself. But what kind
of self-understanding is it? After all, Heidegger is not recommending
suicide as the key to authenticity; nor is he saying that Dasein becomes
authentic when it is dead. Instead of death, which leads us to think of
a not-yet-actual event in the future, Heidegger sometimes writes of
being-toward-death as the name for the possibility in terms of which
Dasein may, or may fail to, project itself. Being-toward-death is not
entirely divorced from death understood as a not-yet-actual event (what
Heidegger calls demise), but involves a more enlightened acknowl-
edgment and understanding of it. When we think of death only as
something not-yet-actual, an eventuality in the indefinite future, we
hold death at arms length, treating it as something that does not bear
on us now. Being-toward-death brings death closer, not by hastening
my demise, nor by exciting a longing for it or any such thing, but by
impressing on us our condition of always being mortal.
Heidegger says that death, understood as being-toward-death, is
Daseins ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not to be out-
stripped (BT: 53). Taken together, these three aspects being ownmost,
62 understanding phenomenology
By realizing that there is a possibility that is indelibly its own, Dasein
is lifted out of the everyday world constituted in terms of das Man and
in two respects. First, in everydayness, Dasein projects itself in terms
of publicly available possibilities (professor, teacher, father, friend) that
are all, as we have seen, relational in nature. All of these everyday pos-
sibilities are optional, in the sense that they can be given up, traded in,
or taken away. By acknowledging its mortality, Dasein for the first time
recognizes something as genuinely its own and so is able to see itself
in terms other than those dictated by the average understanding of das
Man. To borrow from the title of an American soap opera, by facing up
to the idea that it has one death to die, Dasein is able thereby to compre-
hend that it has one life to live. More than that, it is because of being-
toward-death that Dasein is able to conceive of itself as having a life. But
why does Dasein in everydayness fail to achieve this level of comprehen-
sion? Although Daseins absorption in its various projects and pursuits
is no doubt part of the answer, Heidegger ascribes to das Man and so
everydayness a more pernicious effect with respect to acknowledging
being-toward-death; this is the second respect in which being-toward-
death lifts Dasein out of the everyday understanding articulated by das
Man. Heidegger refers to everyday existence as tranquillizing, and the
particular way in which it is so is by shielding us from our mortality.
The idle talk that Heidegger disparages most encodes and circulates
a way of thinking about death as only a distant actuality. We tend, in
everyday life, not to think much about death at all, but even when we
do, we think of it as something that happens to other people, mostly to
people we do not know, but occasionally to friends or family members.
With respect to others, we rarely acknowledge one anothers mortality
as standing features of our existence. When someone is ill, for exam-
ple, and then recovers, we tend to view that person as having evaded
death and so as no longer being related to death in any way. And even
when we overcome this tendency in the case of another person (when a
person is, as we say, terminally ill), we rarely make the reflexive move
of applying this realization to ourselves. Heidegger says that das Man
does not permit us the courage for anxiety in the face of death (BT: 51),
which means that in everyday life death is regarded as an exceptional
condition, to be dealt with only occasionally; any further thoughts of, or
concerns with, death are often dismissed as being excessively morbid.
Heidegger calls the stance fostered by an acknowledgment of ones
being-toward-death (as ones ownmost possibility, which is non-relational
and not to be outstripped) anticipation. Anticipation is not a matter
of brooding about ones eventual demise, of wondering when and how
64 understanding phenomenology
the answer. One would completely misunderstand the phe-
nomenon of resoluteness if one should want to suppose that
this consists simply in taking up possibilities which have been
proposed and recommended, and seizing hold of them.
(BT: 60)
In other words, if you are still looking for someone or something else
to tell you what to do, you have not yet reached the point of resolute-
ness.
Being and Time begins with the question of being: the question of what it
means for anything to be.
Human beings or Dasein have an understanding of being, and so the way to
begin to answer the question of being is to interrogate Dasein in its way of
being.
66 understanding phenomenology
The most basic descriptions of the way things are manifest to Dasein involve
Daseins being situated within, or oriented towards, a world.
In everydayness, Dasein understands both itself and what it encounters
largely in terms of anonymous norms articulated by what Heidegger calls
das Man or the they.
Dasein is a being whose being is an issue for it, and so its way of being is
care, whose three constitutive aspects are understanding, Befindlichkeit and
falling.
Anxiety reveals to Dasein that death is its ownmost possibility.
Dasein can either choose its possibilities in light of its own mortality and so
be authentic, or it can flee from its mortality and remain inauthentic.
68 understanding phenomenology
received a grant to study at the French Institute in Berlin. Here, Sartre
immersed himself in phenomenology and the works of Husserl. This
immersion led quickly to the publication of The Transcendence of the
Ego, a slim volume that sharply criticizes Husserls conception of the
ego and its role in phenomenology. The ensuing years were productive
for Sartre. He published his novel Nausea (1938), as well as works in
philosophical psychology: Imagination, a Psychological Critique (1936),
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and The Imaginary (1940).
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Sartre served as an officer in
the French army, and was taken prisoner by occupying German forces
(he used this time to teach Heidegger to his fellow prisoners). After his
release, Sartre resumed teaching philosophy and writing works in both
philosophy and literature. In 1943, he published both his play The Flies
and his major work in philosophy, Being and Nothingness, subtitled A
Phenomenological Essay in Ontology. These works were quickly fol-
lowed by the play No Exit and the novel The Age of Reason, the first of an
eventual trilogy that Sartre collectively titled The Roads to Freedom. He
also founded the journal Les Temps modernes, which published works
by such figures as Albert Camus and Merleau-Ponty. In 1946, Sartre
published a shorter philosophical essay, The Humanism of Existential-
ism, which began as a public lecture given in 1945. In this work, Sartre
for the first time characterized his philosophy as existentialism (the term
was first coined by Sartres friend, Gabriel Marcel, but Sartre initially
resisted the label), which quickly developed into a widespread intel-
lectual movement, finding devotees not just in philosophy, but also in
psychology, literature, drama and film.
Sartre continued to write in the ensuing decades, including a study
of the writer Jean Genet, as well as works on Mallarm, Flaubert and
Freud. In 1960, he published Critique of Dialectical Reason, which
brought together the existentialist and Marxist strands of his think-
ing. During these years, Sartre was outspokenly political, taking stands
against French colonialism and the Vietnam War, and first for, then
against, the Soviet Union and Cuba. He was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1964, but he declined the award on political grounds.
He died in 1980.
70 understanding phenomenology
him, confesses his inability to find an ever-present ego at the centre
of experience:
The asterisk at the end of the first sentence signals a footnote that
Husserl added in the second edition of Logical Investigations, which
appeared after the publication of the first volume of Ideas. Although
Husserl did not undertake a complete revision of Logical Investigations
so as to align it with his then current conception of phenomenology,
he did add qualifications and corrections by way of notes and appen-
dices (as well as the occasional deletion of whole sections). This par-
ticular note is especially striking as it constitutes a complete reversal
in his position. In the note, Husserl announces the discovery of what
had previously eluded his every effort at detection. The note reads: I
have since managed to find it, i.e. have learnt not to be led astray from
a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms of ego-metaphysic
(LI: 549).
As Husserls conception of phenomenology develops, his view con-
cerning the place of the ego within phenomenology works its way back,
in terms of historical precedent, from a more or less Humean position
to one more closely aligned with that of Descartes. The pure grasp of
the given achieved through the phenomenological reduction includes
a grasp of the pure or transcendental ego as an essential element of the
given. Three passages from the aptly titled Cartesian Meditations may
be illustrative here:
If I keep purely what comes into view for me, the one who
is meditating by virtue of the free epoch with respect to the
being of the experienced world, the momentous fact is that I,
with my life, remain untouched in my existential status, regard-
less of whether or not the world exists and regardless of what
my eventual decision concerning its being or non-being might
be. This Ego, with his Ego-life, who necessarily remains for me,
by virtue of such epoch, is not a piece of the world; and if he
Phenomenological revisions
[I Noesis Noema]
72 understanding phenomenology
Every experience, Husserl claims, has this structure, where the I and
the cogitatum, that is, the ego and the object-as-intended, form the
two poles of the experience. The middle term, the cogito or noesis,
designates the kind or mode of the experience, for example perception,
recollection, desire, hope, fear and so on.
Does all conscious experience really have this tripartite structure?
If we recall a slogan introduced early on in our discussion that all
consciousness is consciousness of something, that is, that intentional-
ity is the defining feature of consciousness, then the middle and right-
most elements of this three-part formula do indeed appear essential.
Every (intentional) experience requires an object (cogitatum/noema)
and that object must be experienced in some way or other, for exam-
ple, perceived, desired, feared, recollected and so on (cogito/noesis).
Whereas Husserl argues that the left-most element is equally essential,
Sartre claims that careful attention to experience shows this not to be
so. That is, Sartre argues that when we restrict our attention to the flow
of experience strictly as experienced, which, after all, is what the phe-
nomenological reduction purports to facilitate, no I, self or ego
is manifest as part of that flow. This, at least, is true of what Sartre calls
first-degree consciousness.
Consider the following example. I am in my kitchen making bread.
My large green ceramic bowl stands before me on the counter. I have
already added warm water and yeast to the bowl, and I am now stirring
in flour to make the dough. The interior of the bowl nearly exhausts
my visual field as I intently watch the slowly forming dough (too much
flour yields a solid cannonball, unworthy of baking, let alone eating;
too little makes for a sticky mess), but I am peripherally aware of the
surrounding countertop, the measuring cup and bag of flour just to
the right, the corner of the cookbook just to the left, the toaster sit-
ting unused behind the bowl. At the same time, I smell the familiar,
yeasty odours that are integral to making bread, along with the linger-
ing, although fainter, aroma of the mornings coffee. I hear the spoon
as it knocks against the side of the bowl, but I have the radio on and
intermittently attend to the music being played or the words of the
programmes host. My left hand grips the side of the bowl, which is
cool and smooth, and my right hand holds the rougher wooden spoon.
I quickly feel a dull ache in my right bicep as the added flour increases
the resistance of the mixture.
If we reflect on this sketch of a description, it would all seem to be just
so much grist for Husserls mill. After all, every sentence of the descrip-
tion contains at least one occurrence of I or my (or both), and so
74 understanding phenomenology
this to be the case? For Sartre, these questions provide little in the way
of argumentative leverage. To begin with the most basic issue, nothing
is gained by substituting revelation for imposition, since to speak of
reflection as revealing an ego implies that such an ego was hidden prior
to reflection and so not manifest in non-reflective experience, which is
precisely Sartres point. Anything that requires reflection to bring it to
the level of manifestation could not be part of the content of first-degree
consciousness; the very idea of an unexperienced content of experience
displays its own absurdity.
This initial response to our imagined objection can be further devel-
oped so as to reveal an even deeper problem with an appeal to an I or
ego as an essential element in all experience. If we allow that reflection
reveals the I or ego, and so concede that the I or ego is not manifest in
first-degree consciousness before the act of reflection, then to posit that
the ego is always a structural feature of consciousness is to violate the
most fundamental principle of phenomenology. That is, phenomenol-
ogy casts itself as a non-speculative, non-hypothetical enterprise. The
whole point of the phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops
it, is to work in accordance with his principle of all principles, which,
it will be recalled, demands that everything originarily (so to speak,
in its personal actuality) offered to us in intuition is to be accepted
simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits
in which it is presented there (Ideas I: 24). The final clause is what
is most important for our purposes, since the postulation of an ever-
present ego amounts to an inference that goes beyond the limits of
what is presented in experience. The content of experience is nothing
other than what is experienced: there are no non-experienced elements
of experience. Careful phenomenological description shows that Hus-
serls transcendental ego is just such a non-experienced element. To
posit an ego at the level of first-degree consciousness is to introduce an
opaque element into consciousness, thereby occluding what Sartre
calls its translucency, and so, as Sartre rather colourfully puts it, the
transcendental ego is the death of consciousness (TE: 40).
We are now in the vicinity of Sartres second main objection to Hus-
serls conception of the transcendental ego, namely, that the I or ego
does not serve to unite consciousness. More strongly put, Sartres claim
is that such an I or ego could not play this role, since, as we have seen,
the introduction of a non-experienced element marks the death of
consciousness, rather than establishing its unity. According to Sartre,
consciousness needs nothing beyond itself for its unity; the intentional-
ity of consciousness, its synthetichorizonal structure, confers all the
76 understanding phenomenology
At the same time, Husserl is unworried by these alterations, since the
task of reflection is not to repeat the original process; instead, the
goal of reflection is to consider and explicate what can be found
in the original process (ibid.). In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre
writes:
78 understanding phenomenology
The constitution of the ego revisited
80 understanding phenomenology
I reply, without interrupting my activity, I am making bread. The I
here, Sartre maintains, is empty, as nothing determinate is presented
in connection with it; an I does not show itself here, however adumbra-
tively, as the source of the doing, as the owner of the action, and so as
the referent of the report. When I use I in this way, I am almost using
it in a third-person manner, as another way to pick out something going
on in the objective world, rather than revealing or reporting my interior
existence. In so far as anything is picked out by this use of I, it would
be my body as the locus or centre of these activities. Sartre refers to the
body here as constituting an illusory fulfillment (TE: 90), by which
I take him to mean that my body is not in any particular way manifest
to consciousness on the occasion of these sorts of reports. Think here
of the peculiarity of replacing I with my body: My body is making
bread, instead of I am making bread. The artificiality of the substitu-
tion indicates that my body does not really serve to fulfil the sense of
I when used in a non-reflective way.
82 understanding phenomenology
his self that is, that which has his various perceptions comes up
empty; all Hume reports being able to find are just more perceptions,
various thoughts and feelings. Hume concludes that nothing corre-
sponds to the notion of a self: the notion fails to pick anything out
above and beyond the various perceptions detected through introspec-
tion. The self is thus a kind of fiction, according to Hume, and so in that
sense self-knowledge is impossible, not through any difficulties with
respect to access or perspective, but because there is no self to know.
Sartres position on the ego may at first appear to be wholly contrary to
Humes. For example, while the ego is only given adumbrationally, and
so possesses the kind of opacity common to all transcendent entities,
Sartre insists that the ego is not given only hypothetically. Even though,
for any given state or action that I judge my ego to have or perform, I
can always entertain the possibility that such a judgement is mistaken
(Perhaps I do not hate Peter, Perhaps I do not doubt Pauls friendship
and so on), it makes no sense, Sartre thinks, to reason in this fashion
about the ego itself. Perhaps I have no ego is patently absurd, as is the
conjecture Perhaps I have an ego. Although Sartres rejection of the
idea that the egos existence is hypothetical may appear to confer a kind
of certainty on its existence, this is not the case. Instead, the absurdity of
these two hypothetical statements stems, according to Sartre, from the
idea that ascribing states and actions to an ego adds nothing to them
and so I do not incur a further commitment through such an ascription.
Indeed, Sartre likens the relation between the ego and its states to one of
poetic production (TE: 77), in keeping with his depiction of the egos
manifestation as involving a backwards traversal of time that lends to
the ego a rather magical aura. Indeed, Sartre claims that it is exclu-
sively in magical terms that we should speak of the relations of the me
to consciousness (TE: 68), and that we are sorcerers of ourselves each
time we view our me (TE: 82). Sartre thus appears here rather closer to
Hume than one may have initially thought. The poetic, even magical,
manifestation of the ego recalls Humes general strategy of explaining
the origin of ideas for which there is no corresponding impression by
appealing to the workings of the imagination.
Equally magical is Sartres talk of the vanishing of the ego on the
removal of all the states, actions and qualities it shows itself as uniting.
Now this idea need not be construed as undermining the reality of the
ego. After all, for any transcendent entity, we might well wonder what
remains when all of its various properties or qualities are imagined away.
To maintain that a transcendent entity is real, we need not be committed
to the idea that it exists as some sort of bare substratum, independent of
84 understanding phenomenology
many central themes of Being and Nothingness are foreshadowed by The
Transcendence of the Ego. In the remainder of this chapter, rather than
attempt anything like a comprehensive summary of Being and Nothing-
ness, I shall try to sketch some of those lines of continuity, in order to
show how Sartres early criticisms of Husserl initiated the development
of an elaborate, richly textured philosophical view.
As we have seen, in The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre still conceives
of phenomenology as operating within a largely Husserlian framework:
his dispute with Husserl concerning the question of the transcendental
ego is, we might say, an intramural one. Sartre thus conceives of con-
sciousness, at least as studied by phenomenology, in terms of purity
and translucency, and so in terms of the phenomenological reduction.
Indeed, Sartre sees his practice of the reduction as more rigorous than
Husserls, purging the field of conscious awareness of all transcendent
entities, including the I or ego. The resultant field is entirely devoid of
objects, and so, odd as this may sound, is not really a something at all.
As Sartre puts it towards the end of The Transcendence of the Ego:
86 understanding phenomenology
those expectations, Pierres absence is no more a feature of the cafe than
Napoleons. This point can be generalized: the negative features of the
world, all of the negatits, cannot be accounted for except in relation to
human attitudes towards the world. Man is the being through whom
nothingness comes to the world (BN: 59).
This appeal to human attitudes places us squarely in the domain of
intentionality, in the domain of consciousness, and this provides deeper
insight into the origins of nothingness. As we saw in the passage cited
from The Transcendence of the Ego, the very idea of consciousness
involves the idea of nothingness. Consciousness is a nothing, and this
can be discerned in the notion of intentionality itself. Conscious states
are of objects but are not those objects. Intentionality thus involves a
kind of slippage or gap, presenting and representing objects without
literally having or being those objects. Consciousness is of something
that it is not, and so in that sense is what it is not. Sartre thus thinks that
a defining feature of the for-itself, of human existence understood in
terms of consciousness, is the failure of the principle of identity (Bishop
Butlers maxim that everything is what it is and not another thing
fails to hold true in the domain of the for-itself). Again, this idea is
foreshadowed in The Transcendence of the Ego, where Sartre concludes
that conscious states, as a kind of nothing, cannot be accounted for by
any preceding actualities:
Existentialism
The term existentialism (actually its French equivalent) was coined by Marcel,
who applied it to the thought of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Sartre at first rejected
the label, claiming not to know what it meant. Shortly thereafter, in his The
Humanism of Existentialism, Sartre happily applied the term both to his own
view and to those of others before him, including Heidegger, despite the
roughly two-decade lag between the appearance of Being and Time and Mar-
cels neologism. The term has come to be associated not just with Heidegger,
but also other earlier twentieth-century figures such as Karl Jaspers (whose
Existenzphilosophie was no doubt a source of inspiration for Marcels coin-
age) and Martin Buber, and nineteenth-century figures such as Friedrich
Nietzsche and Sren Kierkegaard. Various of Sartres contemporaries were
also labelled as existentialist thinkers, including Merleau-Ponty and Albert
Camus. For Sartre, the defining commitments of existentialism are first that,
in the case of human beings, existence precedes essence, and secondly, that
subjectivity must be the starting point. What these two statements indicate
is existentialisms concern with the special character of human existence, as
something irreducibly subjective and so incapable of being fully appreciated
or explained from an objective point of view. For the existentialist, this con-
cern is not merely of theoretical importance, but carries practical significance
as well. A genuinely human life can only be lived in the recognition of this
insight about human existence; at the same time, the existentialist worries
that we all too often lose or efface our freedom, and live out our lives afflicted
instead with despair (Kierkegaard), as members of the herd (Nietzsche), as
mired in inauthenticity (Heidegger), or in bad faith (Sartre).
88 understanding phenomenology
itself to consciousness both as a transcendent object and as the source
of consciousness. Consciousness is thus lured to identify with this ego,
and the various, futile quests to experience and know this self indicate
consciousnesss struggle to achieve a kind of fixity or stasis. Writing in
the Conclusion of The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre characterizes a
possible relation between consciousness and the ego that anticipates
one of the patterns characteristic of bad faith:
90 understanding phenomenology
I know to be true secreted away, unavailable to the one I wish to deceive
(provided, of course, that I am careful and clever, so as not to give myself
away or let the truth be discovered).
Self-deception, by contrast, cannot partake of this straightforward
model: Bad faith has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only
what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself
that I am hiding the truth (BN: 89). Since the deceiver and the one
deceived are one and the same consciousness, it is far from clear how
anything can both be known by me to be true (which is necessary for
me to play the role of the deceiver) and at the same time be kept hidden
from me (which is necessary for me to play the role of the deceived). If
I know something to be true, then I cannot hide that fact from myself,
and if something is hidden from me, then I cannot know it to be true.
The very idea of self-deception appears to pull itself apart by involving
requirements that cannot be simultaneously met. If self-deception is
indeed possible, then we need an account of consciousness and human
existence that makes that possibility intelligible.
One way we might try to understand the possibility of self-deception
(and so the possibility of bad faith) is by introducing a split or division
within consciousness, so as to replicate the structure of ordinary decep-
tion; the truth is kept hidden away in one part of the mind, while the
opposite is held to be true in the other. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre
devotes considerable attention to one extremely influential conception
of such a split or division, namely, Freuds conception of the mind as
involving both consciousness and a more subterranean region, the
unconscious (see BN: 9096). Freuds bifurcated model of the mind,
together with the mechanism of repression, would appear to solve the
puzzle of self-deception. The deep, dark truth is kept repressed in the
region of the unconscious, while consciousness blithely carries on in
blissful ignorance of that truth. Despite its allure, however, Sartre finds
Freuds model highly unsatisfactory. I will not rehearse the entirety of
Sartres argument here, but the basic idea is that Freuds model, to serve
as an explanation of self-deception, ultimately presupposes the idea of
bad faith, and so is no explanation at all. That is, Freuds division in the
mind runs the danger of treating the mind in terms of the in-itself, as
two repositories, one marked conscious, the other unconscious, filled
with various items (beliefs, wishes, desires, etc.). So conceived, the mind
is purely passive, and so cannot be conceived of as doing anything with
respect to itself. To avoid this passivity, Freud can, of course, appeal to
the activity of repression, and so postulate a censor that stands between
the unconscious and consciousness, not allowing the problematic items
92 understanding phenomenology
different senses in which he might assert identity claims with respect
to himself. That is, there are various ways in which he might assert, I
am not a cafe waiter, and his manner of comporting himself betrays a
conflation of these different senses. In one sense, I am not a cafe waiter,
asserted of himself by the waiter, is perfectly in order, since he is not a
waiter in the way that, for example, my coffee cup is a coffee cup; since
human beings lack fixed identities, no identity statement is fully true
of them. Still, there is something misleading in the waiters assertion, in
the sense that it is less true when asserted by him than by, for example,
the grocer down the street: the cafe waiter is a cafe waiter in a way that
the grocer is not, in the sense that being a waiter does pick out one of
his patterns of activity, and not one of the grocers. The waiter, by only
playing at being a waiter, thus exemplifies this latter sense of I am not
a cafe waiter, thereby denying that being a waiter has anything to do
with who he is. He thus denies his facticity, identifying exclusively with
his transcendence, and so is in bad faith.
Given the instability and paradoxicality of human existence, one
might well wonder how bad faith can be avoided: we are always, it
appears, in danger of overemphasizing one rather than the other of
our constitutive dimensions. This may be so, but Sartre also claims that
these two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of valid
coordination (BN: 98). Whatever this valid coordination ultimately
looks like, Sartre is clear that the antidote to the deceiving patterns of
bad faith is not to be found in notions such as sincerity, honesty and
good faith. Indeed, Sartre argues that sincerity is itself a pattern of bad
faith, since the admonition to be who you really are affirms of human
existence precisely the kind of fixity and determination that it lacks. But
if good faith is no better than bad, what further possibilities are there?
To answer this last question, we need to consider a further idea that
I have until this point omitted from our discussion. Sartre holds that
since human beings, as conscious beings, are non-self-coinciding, they
are also beings whose mode of existence is freedom. We are, as Sartre
famously puts it, condemned to be free (HE: 41), precisely because
we are not fully determined, and so incapable of being summarized by
a standing body of facts. Our anguish and our freedom are bound up
with one another (hence the idea that we are condemned to freedom).
Our existence is something we have to confront and determine through
existing, through the choices and decisions that we make. Human
beings, Sartre thinks, can always confront their existence in terms of
choice, as patterns of activity they can either continue or discontinue
projecting into the future.
94 understanding phenomenology
Summary of key points
Sartre claims, contra Husserl, that the ego does not appear in or to conscious-
ness in non-reflective experience.
The ego appears as a transcendent object in second-degree, reflective con-
sciousness.
The ego is constituted like other transcendent objects, via adumbrational,
incomplete appearances.
The ego is by nature fugitive, which means that any attempt at self-knowledge
is ultimately futile.
Human existence, as involving consciousness or the for-itself, is the source
of nothingness, of whatever negative features reality possesses.
As involving nothingness and indeterminacy, human existence is prone to
anguish.
To alleviate this anguish, human beings slide into bad faith, which involves
acting either as though who one is was already fixed and determined or as
though ones existence was entirely distinct from ones situation and past
choices.
96 understanding phenomenology
helped Sartre to found and edit Les Temps modernes and, like Sartre, he
took public positions on social and political issues. As with Sartre, his
political views were deeply informed by Marxism. However, political
questions, prompted by the Korean War, created a rift between Merleau-
Ponty and Sartre, which was made formal in 1953 when Merleau-Ponty
resigned from Les Temps modernes.
During these politically charged debates and disagreements, Mer-
leau-Pontys academic career continued onwards and upwards. In 1945,
he began teaching at the University of Lyons, where he was appointed
Professor in 1948, and in 1952, he was elected to the Chair of Phi-
losophy at the Collge de France, a position previously held by Henri
Bergson. His publications following the appearance of Phenomenology
of Perception include Humanism and Terror (1947), Sense and Non-
Sense (1948), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), In Praise of Philosophy
and Other Essays (1960) and The Prose of the World (1969), the last an
unfinished manuscript published subsequent to his untimely death in
1961. At the time of his death, Merleau-Ponty was also at work on a
significant extension and revision of his phenomenology. This similarly
unfinished manuscript has been published under the title The Visible
and the Invisible.
In this chapter, we shall concentrate exclusively on Phenomenology
of Perception, and even here, we shall confine ourselves largely to the
Preface, Introduction and Part One of the book (roughly the first 200
pages). Phenomenology of Perception constitutes a thorough rethink-
ing of phenomenology and phenomenological method (as we shall
see below, Merleau-Ponty holds that such rethinking is essential to the
ongoing practice of phenomenology), although there is no doubt that
Merleau-Ponty learned a great deal from Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre,
as well as Scheler. Perhaps the most striking feature of Merleau-Pontys
phenomenology, in contrast with Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre, is the
extent of its engagement with ongoing empirical research in the natural
sciences, especially psychology, physiology and linguistics. Merleau-
Ponty was deeply influenced by Gestalt psychology (in the 1930s, he
attended Aron Gurwitschs lectures on the subject), especially its empha-
sis on the holistic structure of experience.
Merleau-Ponty did not, however, slavishly bow to the empirical
findings of the day. On the contrary, a great deal of his attention to
empirical research is devoted to exposing the unexamined assumptions
concerning the nature of experience and the often Procrustean concep-
tions of perception, embodiment and human activity at work in the
way scientists interpret their findings. These assumptions, tensions and
Husserl on embodiment
98 understanding phenomenology
existence, alluding only in a cryptic and delegatory fashion to the idea
that Daseins bodily nature hides a whole problematic of its own,
which, Heidegger notes, will not be treated in Being and Time (BT:
23). For the most part, Heidegger never really takes up the problem-
atic anywhere else.) Thus, Sartre will say in Being and Nothingness that
being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly conscious-
ness (BN: 404). He quickly adds that being-for-itself can not be united
with a body (BN: 404). Talk of a union between consciousness and the
body involves a conflation of two different, mutually exclusive mani-
festations of the body: my body as experienced by me and my body as
experienced by others.
In many of Husserls works published during his lifetime, the experi-
ence of ones body and the bodys role in the experience of other kinds
of objects receives little, if any, attention, and indeed, his endeavours to
isolate and describe pure or absolute consciousness and the pure,
non-empirical ego, along with the requisite procedures of the phenom-
enological reduction, invite imagery of a kind of ghostly, disembodied
field or realm of consciousness. This imagery is further encouraged
by Husserls own characterizations of his investigations as being con-
ducted in the spirit of Descartes (e.g. his work of 1929, titled Cartesian
Meditations). Descartes, after all, is the author of Cartesian dualism,
which conceives of the mind and the body as two distinct, mutually
exclusive substances, each of which is capable of existing independently
of the other (this is part of what it means to think of each of them as
substances). In the Sixth Meditation, as part of the central argument
for this separation between mind and body, Descartes claims that he is
able clearly and distinctly to conceive of himself existing exclusively
as a thinking thing, entirely apart from his body (likewise, he is able
to conceive of his body existing entirely apart from his mind). Although
Descartes also holds that the mind and body do in fact exist in a state
of substantial union, joined together and capable of mutually affect-
ing one another, their ontological separation remains a cornerstone of
his overall view.
Despite his invocations of Descartes and Cartesianism, Husserl does
not partake of Descartess ontological dualism. Indeed, when Husserl
does address the issue of embodiment and the bodily character of expe-
rience, his conclusions run directly counter to the claims that motivate
Descartess view, namely, the claims concerning the conceivability of the
distinction between mind and body. Husserls most highly developed
treatment of the body appears in the second volume of Ideas, which
was not published during his lifetime. Attention to this work dispels
Let us, as Husserl does, explore claim (b) first. The claim that the body
plays an essential role with respect to different forms of intentional-
ity should be understood as a constitutional claim: the constitution in
experience of various kinds of objects involves the body. By involves,
Husserl does not mean to be asserting a claim about physiology; he is
not making a claim about whatever causal mechanisms are at work in
the body that may be productive with respect to various forms of expe-
rience. Rather involves should also be understood phenomenologi-
cally. In order to have experiences that are of or about various kinds of
objects, I must experience myself as embodied, as having a body. (In
keeping with the strictures of the phenomenological reduction, this
latter claim can be true even when I do not in fact have a body.)
The objects Husserl has in mind are material, spatiotemporal objects:
ordinary things such as rocks and trees, tables and chairs. Thus, his
claim is that in order to have experience that is of or about material,
spatiotemporal objects, one must experience oneself as embodied. Most
broadly, Husserl claims: The Body is, in the first place, the medium of
all perception; it is the organ of perception and is necessarily involved in
all perception (Ideas II: 18). To begin to explicate this claim, we must
begin with a remark about terminology, since the use of the upper-case
for Body records an important distinction. In German, all nouns are
capitalized, but the translations use of the capital B signals that the
To say that this Ego, or the soul, has a Body does not merely
mean that there exists a physicalmaterial thing which would,
through its material processes, present real preconditions for
conscious events or even, conversely, that in its processes
there occur dependencies on conscious events within a stream
of consciousness . Soul and psychic Ego have a Body;
there exists a material thing, of a certain nature, which is not
merely a material thing but is a Body, i.e., a material thing
which, as localization field for sensations and for stirrings of
feelings, as complex of sense organs, and as phenomenal part-
ner and counterpart of all perceptions of things makes up a
fundamental component of the real givenness of the soul and
the Ego. (Ideas II: 40)
By sight I have the ideas of light and colors, with their several
degrees and variations. By touch I perceive, for example, hard
and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and all these
more or less either as to quantity or degree. Smelling furnishes
me with odors, the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys
sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition.
And as several of these are observed to accompany each other,
they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed
as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain color, taste, smell,
figure, and consistence having been observed to go together,
are accounted one distinct thing signified by the name apple;
other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and
Even once we have determined that the lines enclosed by the arrows
are indeed equal, and so on seeing them judge that they are equal, it
Here we know, and so judge, that this picture is really just nine lines on
the paper, a two-dimensional drawing. At the same time, it is extremely
difficult actually to see the picture as merely a two-dimensional assem-
blage of lines. The picture appears immediately and involuntarily as
a three-dimensional cube, no matter what judgements, indeed true
judgements, we may have formed. Seeing would thus appear to be pre-
judicative.
Persistent perceptual illusions are not the only domain where the
distinction between perceiving and judging is evident; cases of persist-
ent illusion only help to bring out the distinction in an especially vivid
manner. According to Merleau-Ponty, the distinction is quite generally
applicable: the primary layer of perceptual experience that phenom-
enology seeks to isolate and describe is, in keeping with its status as
pre-objective, pre-judicative through and through. The indeterminacy
and incompleteness that are constitutive of perceptual experience signal
the secondary role of judgement. When I scan the classroom looking
for a particular student, I may, finally, judge explicitly that she is in
fact present, but that is only one moment in my perceptual experience;
before the judgement, I was seeing the classroom and the students, but
my visual experience lacked the kind of determinacy recorded by the
eventual judgement. The student I was looking for was both there-to-
be-seen and yet not fully present in my visual field. By insisting on the
primacy of judgement, the intellectualist effaces these kinds of tensions
and indeterminacies in the act of perception, thereby rendering per-
ceptual experience as more frozen and static than it really is and must
be. Intellectualism is thus an overreaction to the lifeless, mechanical
model offered by the empiricist. As Merleau-Ponty notes, neither view
can accommodate the vital character of perceptual experience as it is
lived:
When I set out to type, my hands and fingers find their places on the
keyboard without me having to look. I may, on occasion, have to adjust
my hands or correct their position, but by and large I type without
observing my fingers at all.
Beyond phenomenology?
Over the past four chapters, we have considered the four main figures
in the phenomenological tradition. Although, as we have seen, the
phenomenological tradition is hardly monolithic, replete as it is with
intramural debates and in some cases wholesale changes in orientation
(consider the divide between Husserls and Heideggers respective con-
ceptions of phenomenology), there is nonetheless among these figures a
shared sense of there being a distinctive philosophical discipline worthy
of the name phenomenology, and so a shared sense that phenomenol-
ogy is both possible and, indeed, philosophically indispensable. Despite
many differences both at the programmatic level and at the level of
detail, all four figures Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
agree that phenomenology is not only worth doing, but that it aspires
to be the method for philosophy.
In presenting the views of these four figures, I have taken something of
a used-car salesman approach, highlighting the strengths of each posi-
tion and downplaying the weaknesses, except where outright incompat-
ibilities among the positions prevented my doing so. I have thus served
more or less as an advocate for each position, all the while realizing that
one could not embrace all four simultaneously. Although one must pick
and choose among these positions in phenomenology, there remains the
option of opting out of phenomenology altogether, and not just out of
personal interest and inclination, but because of more principled philo-
sophical considerations. That is, perhaps it is the case that the shared
In the preceding chapters we paid little heed to a theme that runs through
the entirety of phenomenology (and really a great deal of philosophy
ever since Descartes). Although we have considered many modes and
categories of manifestation spatiotemporal objects (Husserl), equip-
ment and world (Heidegger), the ego or self (Sartre) and the body (Mer-
leau-Ponty) we have not considered in any detail the distinctive ways
in which others, that is, other subjects of experience, show themselves
in experience. Two questions immediately present themselves:
That the face involves a presentation that is ethical rather than onto-
logical and that is irreducible to manifestation undermines the pri-
macy and generality of phenomenology. Rather than phenomenon,
Levinas sometimes refers to the presentation of the face as an enigma,
a mystery of infinite depth or height. No intuition or intuitions, no
explication of the meaning of being, no return to phenomena, will ever
succeed in dispelling this sense of mystery or in removing this enigma.
Husserl was perhaps more correct than he realized in referring to the
apprehension of the other as a puzzling possibility; where he went
wrong, according to Levinas, is in supposing that phenomenology
could offer a solution.
This general notion of indication covers both signs and what might be
called natural indicators. The former include things such as brands
For Husserl, (b) is the locus of genuine meaning or sense, whereas (a)
is only meaningful in a derivative sense. Notice that sensible, physical
signs derive their meaning from mental states by being associatively
linked with them, which means that linguistic signs involve the notion
of indication: linguistic signs indicate, or point to, the mental states that
are the locus of genuine meaning or sense. The distinction between (a)
and (b) can be further delineated by noting the absence of an essential
connection between the sensible, physical signs and the underlying,
meaningful expressions. Since expressions are only associatively linked
with sensible signs, whatever meaning we accord to sensible signs has a
conventional component. On reflection, we can see that it need not have
been the case that the string of letters wet means wet; had language
evolved differently, the concatenation of those three letters may have
come to mean something else.
Given this two-tiered conception, Husserl distinguishes between
communication and what he calls solitary mental life. The way com-
munication works for Husserl is as follows. Subject A has certain
thoughts he wishes to communicate to subject B. Accordingly, A pro-
duces a series of sounds or marks (i.e. words), which A intends to be
the outward manifestation (sign, indication) of those thoughts. Subject
B in turn perceives these outward signs or indications, and then sur-
mises the mental states of A that A wished to communicate. On this
picture of communication, indication plays an essential role; moreo-
ver, communication always involves a kind of gap, to be bridged by a
surmise of the kind one makes in the move from indicator to indi-
cated. What I am trying to express by means of the indicative signs
I produce is something my interlocutor needs to figure out. Solitary
mental life, by contrast, involves no such gap: Expressions function
meaningfully even in isolated mental life, where they no longer serve to
indicate anything (LI: 269). Such pure expressions, dispensing with
the notion of indication altogether, no longer involve the use of words
as signs. Indeed, there can be no indicative function for words in soli-
tary mental life, since there is no gap between the mental states and the
experience of them. There is nothing to surmise or connect by means
of an associative link, because the mental states are fully present to the
one whose states they are, experienced at that very moment of their
coming into existence (here we begin to see the way in which Husserls
initial distinction is bound up with a conception of consciousness as
Dennetts heterophenomenology
Phenomenological rejoinders
Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same
significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive,
for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that
world. (PP: viiiix)
The physicists atoms will always appear more real than the his-
torical and qualitative face of the world, the physico-chemical
The following questions are designed to facilitate discussion and may also be appro-
priate as paper topics.
1. How and why does Husserl argue against naturalism? What is the relation
between his arguments against a naturalistic conception of logic and his
conception of phenomenology? Why does he think that the phenomena of
phenomenology cannot be understood as natural entities, akin to material
objects?
2. In what way(s) is phenomenology for Husserl a transcendental investigation?
What kinds of questions does phenomenology consider, and why does Hus-
serl think that the natural attitude, including the natural sciences, is unable
to answer those sorts of questions?
3. What is the phenomenological reduction? How does it work and why does
Husserl think it is necessary for phenomenology? What, according to Hus-
serl, does the phenomenological reduction reveal?
4. Consider your own perceptual experience, a particular episode of visual or
auditory experience, and try to describe it using Husserls structural con-
cepts, such as retention and protention, horizon and synthesis, noesis and
noema. How might one argue that these structures are essential to your expe-
rience being what it is?
5. What is the eidetic reduction? How does it work? How is it different from
the phenomenological reduction? Why is the eidetic reduction essential to
Husserls overall project of transcendental phenomenology?
1. What is the problem of other minds? How does the problem arise in phe-
nomenology and how is the problem treated in the conceptions of phenom-
enology we have explored in Chapters 14?
2. What is wrong with the notion of totality, understood as the goal or purpose
of intellectual enquiry? What gets ignored or effaced in the quest for totali-
zation? Why does Levinas think that phenomenology exemplifies Western
philosophys striving for totality?
Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern & Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenom-
enology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995) provides a comprehen-
sive introduction to Husserls philosophy, ranging from his views on mathematics
and logic to his conception of the lifeworld, developed in some of his final works.
The second chapter, on the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, is especially
helpful, as the authors document the several different motivations for the perform-
ance of the reduction. Hubert Dreyfus & Harrison Hall (eds), Husserl, Intentional-
ity, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) contains a number
of essays that are useful in terms of explicating and evaluating Husserls phenom-
enology, with an emphasis on his relevance to contemporary cognitive science and
philosophy of mind. The pair of papers by Dagfinn Fllesdal (Husserls Notion of
Noema and Husserls Theory of Perception) provides short, clear discussions of
some of Husserls main ideas.
Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, R. Cohen & M. Smith
(trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998) is a collection of Levi-
nass essays on Husserl, ranging from 1929 to 1977. Given their span, the essays
allow one to observe Levinass transition from student of phenomenology to sym-
pathetic critic. His The Theory of Intuition in Husserls Phenomenology, 2nd edn, A.
Orianne (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995) is a study of
Husserls phenomenology, written by Levinas very early in his philosophical career
(in 1930, at the age of 24) shortly after studying with Husserl in Freiburg.
Jan Patoka, An Introduction to Husserls Phenomenology (Chicago, IL: Open
Court, 1995) is a helpful introduction, covering a number of central topics, includ-
ing Husserls early, formative ideas on logic and arithmetic, the reduction, time-
consciousness, and embodiment. Patoka, a Czech philosopher, was one of Husserls
later students. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967) is a collection of essays on Husserls phe-
nomenology by one of the great French phenomenological philosophers. The com-
mentaries on Cartesian Meditations are especially good for reading alongside the
original work. A collection of essays by contemporary philosophers and scholars in
Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) covers many of the central topics
in Husserls phenomenology.
J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) is in large part a meticu-
lous reconstruction of Derridas arguments against Husserl in Speech and Phenom-
ena, along with a vigorous defence of Husserl against them.
Aristotle 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle, R. McKeon (ed.). New York: Random
House.
Armstrong, D. 1981. The Nature of Mind and Other Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Beauvoir, S. de 1962. The Prime of Life. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
Berkeley, G. [1710] 1957. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,
C. Turbayne (ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.
Churchland, P. 1988. Matter and Consciousness, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Dennett, D. C. 1981. Brainstorms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. 1982. How to Study Human Consciousness Empirically, or Nothing
Comes to Mind. Synthese 59 (1982), 15980.
Dennett, D. C. 1992. Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Derrida, J. 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs,
D. Allison (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, J. 1978. Writing and Difference, A. Bass (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Ellis, W. D. (ed.) 1938. A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Haldane, E. E. & G. R. T. Ross (eds) 1984. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol.
1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time, J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (trans.). New
York: Harper & Row.
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Heidegger, M. 1977. Basic Writings, D. Krell, (ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
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Heidegger, M. 1985. The History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, T. Kisiel (trans.).
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
absorption body
Heidegger on 557, 60, 63 and constitution 100103
Sartre on 74, 77, 89 as Body 100
actualities 35, 54, 87, 129 as illusory fulfillment of I 81, 98
actuality 56, 61, 63, 74, 139, 165 as zero-point of orientation 1023, 105,
adumbrations 2831, 35, 76, 79, 81, 83, 95, 141
102, 144 constitution of the 1035
anguish 88, 93, 95 habitual 1234
anosognosia 12021 Heidegger on the 989
anticipation 63 Sartre on the 81, 98
anti-naturalism 11, 1415, 17, 21 Brentano, Franz 1112, 17, 39
anxiety 5960, 63, 65, 67, 88 Brunschvicg, Lon 96
apodicticity 20 Buber, Martin 88
Aristotle 1617, 39, 41, 1378 Butler, Joseph Bishop 87
Armstrong, David 170
Aron, Raymond 68 Camus, Albert 69, 88
artificial intelligence 48 care 52, 56
assimilation 138-9, 141, 143, 175 care-structure 523, 567
authenticity 48, 56, 59, 61, 646, 84, 174; see Cartesian dualism 99, 104
also inauthenticity Cartesianism 132
averageness 57 causes (of experience) 3, 7, 100
certainty 1921, 70, 83, 149, 159
bad faith 8895, 174 choosing to choose 64
Beethovens Fifth Symphony 247 Churchill, Winston 29
Befindlichkeit 547, 67 Churchland, Paul 172
being communication 1514
of beings 44 concern 5051
question of 39, 414, 66 conformity 578, 65
understanding of 42, 44, 66 consciousness 12, 1415, 17 1819, 22, 29,
being-for-itself 85, 87, 89, 945, 989 36, 38, 45, 66, 723, 76, 79, 81, 837,
being-in-itself 85, 89, 91, 98 9092, 99, 100, 104, 114, 11920, 126,
being-in-the-world 4952, 55, 60, 66, 124, 1323, 136, 152, 162, 174
14041 cynical 90
being-toward-death 61, 63 death of 75
being-with 141 Dennetts approach to 158
Bergson, Henri 97 and differance 156
Berkeley, Georges 10911, 11415 first-degree 738, 142, 166
index 187
and first-person operationalism 166 equipment 458, 50, 136; see also ready-to-
Heidegger and 165 hand
and heterophenomenology 173 essences 345
as I can 131 ethics 94, 137, 147, 165
Multiple Drafts model of 164, 168, 175 everydayness 49, 567, 65, 67, 141
of movement 130 phenomenology of 457
as presence 151 existence precedes essence 88
priority over scientific points of view 171 existentialism 69, 84, 88, 96
pure 72, 85, 107, 133, 148 Existenzphilosophie 88
reflective 8081, 84, 95 experience
scientific investigation of 160 auditory 8, 237, 101
and scientific method 170 causal structure of 8, 1617, 22
second-degree 76, 7980, 95 essential structure of 4, 78, 17, 213, 27,
as sign-like 154 34, 36, 76
stream of 159, 163 pathological 12021
as text 156 perceptual 3, 1819, 3032, 345, 86, 98,
transcendental 139 1012, 105, 10720, 131, 133, 138, 1435
translucency of 75, 85 pre-objective 108, 118, 133
and the unconscious 157 visual 25, 8, 23, 28, 101, 103, 110, 116,
unreflected 778 126, 138
see also self-consciousness, time-conscious- expression 14953, 175
ness, world-consciousness first-order 107
constancy hypothesis 11415 second-order 1078
constitution 30, 31, 334, 7980, 100, 146
content face, the 1435, 1478, 165, 175
ideal 15, 16, 22 facticity 90, 924, 98
intentional 32, 76, 153 falling 557, 67
conversation 1467 familiarity 45, 50
fear 59
das Man 49, 57, 635, 67 figural blindness 126
Dasein 42, 445, 49, 517, 6061, 637, 88, figure-and-ground 98, 110
989, 14041 finitude 64
and possibilities 54, 56, 6061, 645, 67 Fink, Eugen 10
death 60, 61, 63, 65 first-person authority 82, 162
being-toward- 61, 63 Flaubert, Gustave 69
as Daseins ownmost possibility 61, 62, 67 for-the-sake-of 48, 534
as non-relational 61, 62 free variation 36
as not to be outstripped 61, 62 freedom 64, 93
see also demise Frege, Gottlob 29
de Beauvoir, Simone 68, 88, 96 Freud, Sigmund 12, 69, 91, 1567
deconstruction 135, 155 futurity 56, 66
demise 61, 63
Descartes, Ren 33, 46, 60, 6971, 99, 101, Gelb, Adhmar 126
131, 136, 149 Genet, Jean 69
differance 156 God 149
discourse 1467 Goldstein, Kurt 126
distantiality 57 greifen 1259; see also movement
double-touch 104 Gurwitsch, Aron 97
Dreyfus, Hubert 48
Hegel, G. W. F. 1
ego heterophenomenological worlds 162, 173
empirical 71 heterophenomenology 1578, 16062,
as fiction 834 1645, 171, 173, 175
pure or transcendental 33, 38, 66, 72, horizon 27, 29, 30, 32, 75, 11516
756, 80, 85, 107, 139 Hume, David 46, 7071, 823
empiricism 10812, 114, 116, 11820, 122,
1267, 139 idle talk 58, 63
enigma 148 imagination 278, 35
enjoyment 138 inauthenticity 56, 59, 88; see also authenticity
epoch 22, 51, 158, 160 indeterminacy 114, 118, 133
index 189
referential 479 solitary mental life 1515, 175
relativism 14, 174 speech 58, 1467, 1534; see also idle talk,
repetition 1534 language
representation 123, 125, 13033, 1524 spontaneity 117
repression 912, 1223 Stein, Edith 10
resistance 1445, 165 substance 467, 56, 99, 139
resoluteness 645 synthesis 27, 2931, 756, 155
responsibility 60, 64, 94, 147, 173
retention 267, 155 temporality 567
Ricoeur, Paul 10 thrownness 55
time 28, 53, 56
Santa Claus 29 time-consciousness 26, 155
scepticism see problem of other minds totality 1379, 143
scepticism about phenomenology 1678, 175 trace 1557
Scheler, Max 10, 97 transcendence
Schneider 120, 1257, 129 in Husserl 36
Schutz, Alfred 10 in Sartre 81, 90, 923, 98
self-consciousness 66, 142 transcendental enquiry 5, 18, 36, 89
self-deception 9092 transcendental idealism 36
self-knowledge 813, 95 transcendental questions 17, 212, 40
self-understanding 47, 61, 90
sensations 98, 1034, 10916, 11920 unconscious, the 912, 1567
kinaesthetic 103 understanding 53, 55, 57, 67
localization of 1034 as projection 53, 56
see also sensory atoms pre-ontological 423, 445
sense 29, 31, 36, 38, 14952, 156 see also self-understanding
touch 1034, 115, 1267
sensory atoms 109, 11113 Watt, H. J. 1668
separateness 147 Wertheimer, Max 98
signs 148, 151, 153, 155, 156 world 6, 9, 54, 59; see also life-world
Smart, J. J. C. 170 world-consciousness 51
solicitude 5051
solipsism 13940, 174 zeigen 1259; see also movement